


Day 13

by stayseated



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, F/M, Unsullied!, cabin fever, summer isles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:33:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayseated/pseuds/stayseated
Summary: Team Targaryen are stuck on a ship sailing to Westeros for long weeks. Missandei and Grey Worm both have cabin fever and act out in different-similar ways. (Canon, post-S6)





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> FYI, I started writing this before season 7 and am only getting around to posting it now. So let's go back in time and forget the events of S7 for this fic, mmkay?

 

 

 

**Day 14**

When he wakes up, his head is pounding. His skin is sickly hot and he feels feverish. His stomach is tight and the thought of food is nauseating.

He’s very hungover but he cannot qualify it as such — he’s not yet experienced enough in drinking alcohol and Tyrion has not explained the concept of being hungover to him yet. Presently, Grey Worm can only anecdotally connect his body’s sickliness to all of the alcohol he consumed the night before — or to what he did with her. He feels so awful because of wine or because of what he did with her. Those were the only two deviations from his usual routine.

Within the limited confines of what he knows about alcohol and what he understands about what he did with her — he didn’t know either things to be associated with pain. But he doesn’t have familiarity with anyone who drinks a lot, because he predominately is surrounded by Unsullied and they do not drink. Similarly, he doesn’t have much familiarity with anyone who has sex because he is predominately surrounded by Unsullied, and they do not have sex. It should not be possible. He cannot presently qualify the intimate things that he did with her as sex. It doesn’t seem accurate to compare. Perhaps this is why he feels terrible — because he has done a very bad thing, and he has done it wrong.

She is sleeping peacefully beside him. He feels  _so much_ for her. 

This is why he gets out of bed in a silent panic. This is why he dresses himself in a similar panic. This is why he runs right out of there without saying a word to her.

 

 

  
**Day 1**

It is entirely unexpected when, at the port as they prepare to board the ship, a womanly blur of brown cries out this wail and throws herself into the arms of Eamon. They all freeze in mild alarm as this woman starts sobbing inconsolably.

Missandei watches this scene unfold in front of her. It quickly registers to her that they look like two lovers. She quickly corrects herself and thinks that this can’t be right.

She also recalls how Grey Worm occasionally refers to Eamon — an Unsullied younger than they are, soft-spoken and inexplicably preoccupied with rhetorical sensitivities. Grey Worm has mentioned — with irritation — that Eamon wonders about pain out loud. Eamon also named himself Eamon — perhaps a name that he remembers from before he was cut, perhaps his family name, perhaps his given name. This is in contrast to the rest of the Unsullied, who tended to name themselves after clunky phrases of strength, phrases and words formulated based on their previous debasement, actually.

Standing next to her also watching the scene in front of them continue to play out, Tyrion lets out a low whistle, raises his brows, and crassly mutters, “Too bad he can’t give her a child to remember him by.”

She actually feels deeply embarrassed by the statement. She presses that girlishness down and sets her lips in a thin line as she continues staring impassively ahead. She won’t dignify his inappropriate statement with a response.

Her eyes, of their own volition, keep drifting back over to Eamon and his female friend — and Missandei just can’t stop herself from wondering how in the world they have become so attached to each other, how it is even possible to be so attached to each other. She is prone to thinking that she and Grey Worm are anomalies — abnormal. The evidence in front of her speaks to the contrary.

And then Eamon — so choked up on this bizarre display of emotion — pitches forward and plants his mouth over the mouth of his friend.

Missandei actually makes a noise — a muffled squeak of shock and discomfort. Her mouth actually drops open as heat just floods her face. She turns her face away as her face continues to burn.

She hears Tyrion laughing next to her. He is laughing at her.

He says, “Fuck. Love really will find a way.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

And all he can do to manage his extreme discomfort with his own body and his own mind is to keep snapping at Eamon over every mistake, whether it be minute, real, or made up. Grey Worm invents new rules and procedures on the spot just so he can display his anger over the laxness of the Unsullied. He cannot presently stand Eamon’s face. He cannot stand Eamon’s voice. He cannot stand the way Eamon recoils with each bark that comes out of Grey Worm. Grey Worm thinks that Eamon is going to quickly die in battle because he is this way. Grey Worm is starting to subconsciously worry that he will die quickly because he is becoming weak like Eamon. He is not afraid of death, but he will also handicap Daenerys if his death comes too swiftly.

Dogkiller makes a wry comment about how Grey Worm must have woken up on the wrong bed — purposely flubbing up the words — Grey Worm shoots out his hand and slams it right into Dogkiller’s chest, knocking the other man into a wall. In Low Valyrian, Grey Worm urges Dogkiller to shut the fuck up.

Dogkiller can only smile enigmatically. He knows that Grey Worm did not sleep in his own bed at all last night. He knows because his commander was uncharacteristically late, so Dogkiller went to retrieve him, only to find a bare cot and no wrinkles on the blanket. He has spent the morning lying to other Unsullied, telling them that Grey Worm has been delayed because of another meeting, another responsibility.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

When she wakes up in her bed — she is alone. 

Both of their experiences in this respect is non-existent. Neither of them have had a morning-after. He hadn’t anticipated how hurtful it would feel for her to wake up alone.

She didn’t anticipate that the first thing that would happen when she woke up naked and alone is that she’d start crying.

She’s still flat on her back, and her arms are splayed out, hand touching the rumpled blanket where he had been — and she cannot really articulate to herself what she is feeling presently. She just leaks these tears out of her eyes and feels them streaming down the sides of her face, wetting and pooling in the pad underneath. Her body starts to sweat — and through the crying, she convulses and her body jolts up, as the very first wave of nausea hits her and makes her mouth salivate unappetizingly.

She scrambles out of bed, naked, with her hand tightly clamped over her mouth. She’s afraid she’s going to vomit all over her bedding.

 

 

  
**Day 3**

As they head to Westeros, boredom settles in fast on the ship. He has cabin fever, but he will never admit it. She picks up on his schedule quickly, and every night right after the sun goes down, his dark figure materializes on the lower deck with an unerring consistency. She sits up top on the upper deck with her face pressed against a railing. She can look down on him from her vantage point. Her convenient excuse — if he ever asks — is that she goes up top to watch the sun go down each day. She really sits up there because she likes watching him.

She experimentally thinks about what it would have felt like and how she would have responded and acted out, if she was the one left behind and he was the one leaving to fight a war. She hypothetically thinks about what it would feel like, to never see him again. When she makes herself think about it, her eyes burn and they water and she feels her chest constrict painfully. It feels utterly terrible and pointless. Her own survival feels pointless. In this way, she sees herself mirrored in Eamon and also Eamon’s female friend.

She unfortunately thinks about them a lot — nonstop actually. She wonders how they had found each other. She wonders what they were capable of. She wonders how they figured it out. She tries to mentally measure the bravery it must have taken — or the blindness. She feels scared and relieved by the hopefulness she feels inside because of them.

She hits her forehead against the legs holding up the railing — her feet dangle against the wind — and she closes her eyes. She can remember the way his mouth felt against her mouth — foreign and strange but it didn’t matter because she cared for him so much. She can remember the confidence that threaded through her body, when she told Daenerys that Grey Worm looked at her naked body with intent and it was unmistakable.

She can still hear her mother’s voice in her head. It was one of their last conversations together and their way of life was dying. Her mother was telling her about these laws or these rules about what men what and what men will do at the altar of what they want. She remembers her childlike confusion that eventually gave way to years of anger and bitterness — when she thinks of Kraznys and what he did to her. And what they all did to her family.

She thinks that it is unfair. And it is pointless — to want for more when they are not meant for more.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Most of the Unsullied are too obedient and too respectful to tell Grey Worm that he is unproductively inconsistent today. That, and he is also uncharacteristically emotional. Grey Worm’s emotional agitation is especially apparent and clear to Hero, due to their close proximity over the years and Hero’s status as second-in-command.

Ironically, Grey Worm keeps reaming the rest of them out for their supposed emotional softness. The Unsullied do not yet have a working vocabulary that can expound on the nuances of irony or hypocrisy. They are just getting irritated, and they just keep putting up with Grey Worm’s shitty mood. They respect him so much, but they can’t help but continue flipping back and forth between resigned confusion and semi-aggressive resentment.

Sure Spear, in particular, keeps shooting pointed looks at Hero, as if to silently ask, what the fuck is Grey Worm’s problem today?

Hero can only keep his expression impassive as he also imperceptible raises his shoulders in a near-invisible shrug. He does not know what the fuck Grey Worm’s problem is today. Grey Worm has been spending more time with the dwarf. Maybe this is the dwarf’s fault.

When Grey Worm abruptly cuts off a lecture to rush over to the railing of the ship and vomit out a stream pink-tinged frothy liquid, Hero takes the opportunity to drop his blank expression behind their commander’s back. He shoots Dogkiller and Sure Spear this look of exasperation.

In Low Valyrian, he mouths out the word poison. Grey Worm must have ingested the dwarf’s poison, and it must have affected his mind. This is why the Unsullied don’t drink. Alcohol makes men weak and emotional.

 

 

  
**Day 5**

With alarming, almost pathetic frequency, she’s been thinking about the two of them — together. Like, naked together. Doing things. Days on the ship are long and relatively uneventful, so she has so much time to just think to herself. She has found out that she is gross, and her mind is dirty.

She’s been thinking a lot about whether or not it is possible — if sex is possible. She’s thought an embarrassing amount about the manner in which he was cut. She thinks that if he was cut in a certain way and not another specific way — then sex could be possible. She does not even know how she can confirm how he was cut. Daenerys doesn’t know. And other than Daenerys and Tyrion, she only has one other person that she speaks to on a regular basis. And that is him. So, short of pulling aside him or another Unsullied and just bluntly asking about what is going on underneath their pants, she just has no other means to find out. And she is just _obsessed_ with this.

She feels mortified every time she is around him — and he is talking and she accidentally-on-purpose runs her eyes down to the front of his pants. She feels that she is a terrible person whenever she lets this happen. He has not caught her staring — yet. He will. And she will feel so terrible. She is mortified by her own train of thought because the way she is thinking is disgusting. It debases him, and it dehumanizes him — and he has already suffered enough in his life.

“Missandei,” Grey Worm says patiently. He can tell that her attention has drifted in the course of their conversation.

She blinks and then tries to clear her head. She says, “Yes?”

He is repeating himself. He holds out a hard, crispy piece of stale flatbread to her. He says, “Do you want?”

She takes the bread. He likes to gives her some of his food because he is concerned that ship-living is too unfamiliar and hard on her body. He does not want her to become ill.

She feels utterly sick about this, because he is so wonderful, and she just constantly thinks about debasing him. She glumly says, “Yes, I want.”

 

 

  
**Day 6**

He tends to lead by example. Thus, the first week on the ship is overscheduled with activity, with patrols even. He resolutely walked the relatively short distance on the deck of the ship even though Dogkiller mocks him for it. Dogkiller leans back in his chair with his arms crossed behind his head. He asks Grey Worm to alert them if there is ever a respite from the dark slate, the expansive sea, and the dark violet skies. He asks Grey Worm to call them up right away, if their commander spots a starfish or barnacle infiltrating their ship.

Grey Worm dislikes how Dogkiller undermines his authority. In this way, Dogkiller reminds Grey Worm of Tyrion Lannister. They both talk too much.

Grey Worm also cannot currently stand Eamon’s fucking obsessive questions about whether it’s assured that they will die — his mind clearly made soft by freedom and a growing sense of identity. Eamon is wavering on the honor of dying — he keeps saying the name, “Kira.” A number of the Unsullied have been curious and have been encouraging Eamon to open his stupid dumb mouth about Kira.

Grey Worm’s mood was terrible by the time he gets up on deck. He doesn’t think he was made for seafaring.

He’s all land. He hates the way the boat moves. He hates how unsteady he feels on his feet. He won’t admit to anyone that he has slight seasickness. He walks up top often because the fresh air helps the nausea.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

He cannot mentally let it go. Over dinner, he has to eat with Missandei and Tyrion, because Missandei is the only person he can currently stand the sight of, and Tyrion is just always around.

He tells Missandei about it — about the alarming growing complacency of the Unsullied — and he does so within earshot of everyone because maybe his constantly vocalized condemnation will inspire them to tighten up.

Missandei is also the only one he can rely on to consistently understand these things — she kind of quirks her mouth into a smile. He doesn’t get the tone of her voice at first, when she confidently tells him that his feelings have been hurt. He actually wants to lash out at that — remind her that he’s not some fucking child who didn’t get a piece of candy. He’s an adult, and he is a man. His feelings don’t figure into these matters.

He realizes belatedly — when her smile widens — that what she said was intentionally mocking. It sours his mood further — and she had evidently expected him to laugh, because she looks taken-aback. He realizes that, truthfully, no one fucking understands him.

Tyrion tells him that this kind of camaraderie among the Unsullied can be positive — it will be the thing that makes them fight harder for one another.

Grey Worm sneers and asks, “How many armies have you led?” as he pointedly stares down Tyrion’s stature.

Nonplussed, Tyrion waves Grey Worm off and dryly says, “I was paraphrasing my brother. He’s led a successful battle or two.”

“Unsullied are different!” Grey Worm declares. “We are built different. We are made different. We are different, in culture. Unsullied are not lazy like Westerosi.”

Tyrion laughs in his face. “Oh, no offense taken!” He’s twirling the stem of a wine glass in between his thumb and forefinger. He looks over at Missandei, grinning conspiratorially. Grey Worm tenses. He already feels like he is the butt of yet another stupid joke between the two of them. “You are wound up, quite tightly,” Tyrion says to him conversationally. “You are actually rather unbearable to be around. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Do you know that?”

Grey Worm flicks his eyes over to Missandei’s face, lit up golden with candlelight. She’s smiling at him from behind her glass of wine encouragingly — and he doesn’t even know why. He does know he’s about to be mocked again.

“If you were anyone else, I’d remind you that we’re docking in the morning for — what is it?” Tyrion looks at Missandei. “Four or so hours?”

She nods, but now, uncertainty is creeping into her expression. She doesn’t know where Tyrion is going with this either.

Tyrion grins. “If you were anyone else, I’d tell you to go to a brothel in those four hours and work out your frustrations.”

So this is retribution for that comment about Tyrion’s height.

He wants to fucking get up and just leave the kitchen — but he refuses to give Tyrion the satisfaction. Instead, he settles on being silent and gloomy, as he flags down a glass of wine for himself. He doesn’t want to talk to them anymore, but he wants to cruelly ask Tyrion if this is what they do. Do they just get fat and impotent on wine, women, and food and lose entire kingdoms on such fucking pathetic weak excesses? Is this what they do?

He refuses to look at her imploring face. The wine still tastes acrid and sour to him. He will never understand the appeal of this.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

She has a tendency of sequestering herself to the role of silent observer, rather than active hero. She has a tendency of initially freezing when she feels threatened or uneasy, a habitual instinct that might be genetic, or it might have been imprinted in early childhood trauma. She grew up in fear — whether it was fear of violence, fear of familial separation, fear of unfamiliar adults or authority figures, fear of change. All of these fears were founded — she was taken away from her family. She has witnessed the mutilation and then the deaths of them.

She had to clasp tightly onto obedience to oppressors in order to survive. Her concept of survival is so underdeveloped because she was so young when she was taken from her parents that she spent so much of her adult life wondering why survival is even worth fighting for.

She has knelt at the feet of a man and shook as she remembered her mother’s cautionary tales about the nature of men — before her mother was killed. Her mother had known their time together was going to be short in this life, so her mother spent their last months together imparting lessons onto a daughter who was much too young to learn about such horrific complexities. The lessons instilled a deep sense of fear and caution in Missandei.

Maybe fear is the thing that has kept her alive this whole time. On some days, it’s the only thing she can still remember about her mother.

Master Kraznys mo Nakloz let her keep her given name because he favored her from the start, when he acquired her when she was a child. It was with a sickening, growing awareness that he romanced her from the start — in his own twisted way. He plied her with favors and with good treatment, and Missandei used to be so grateful that she was not treated like the other girls. She was allowed to learn how to read, for instance.

She looks at her naked body in the mirror.

She sees the indentation that his body left on the other side of the bed padding — she sees the rumpled blanket — and she can still smell him. She can smell the scent of his body still in her bed. He smelled like a man, different from her.

And she can feel the ache of her muscles and the rawness of her sensitive skin. And she has all of these memory snippets — of him and of them together — kissing frantically — pulling off their clothes — she just _knows_ that it wasn’t a dream.

Her body also holds evidence of what happened. There is a lingering bite mark — his teeth — on her breast. There’s no way she could’ve bitten herself there.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

Tyrion actually apologizes — admits that he, too, is going a bit stir-crazy cooped up on a ship with nothing particularly interesting or stimulating to pass the time. Tyrion holds out his hand — Grey Worm looks at it suspiciously, before taking the hand in a brief moment of forgiveness. Missandei looks relieved.

Then the hours pass by languidly, with a bottle — never empty — in the middle of the table. It takes him some time to relax his body and drift back into conversation — to forget the tension and the stress in his body. Tyrion does most of the talking — making them to listen to his long-winded stories from his childhood. He laughs at his own stories and occasionally tries to pull them both into the past — mostly with little success. This is still something they are not practiced at — reminiscing about the good old days — maybe it’s something they are not ever going to be good at.

“I remember — a toy boat,” Missandei says haltingly, scrunching her face up, trying to recall a happy memory from when she was a child. “My brother made it for me. He carved it out of a piece of wood. I played with it in the tub.” She holds up her hands. “Until my skin was wrinkled. I remember — wanting to play with the boat all the time. But my — my mother — was scared I’d get sick. If I sat in the cold tub for too long.”

“That’s cute,” Tyrion says.

“Thank you,” she says back to him.

Grey Worm honestly cannot remember anything from before he was cut. He cannot remember his family. He cannot remember being a child. He cannot even remember how or when exactly he was cut. Sometimes he half-heartedly tries to remember, but he never knows if the flashes of people and faces are just things he is making up or if they are actually recollections. She has shed tears over it — making him feel awkward — and she has told him that he was likely so traumatized by his experiences that his mind has closed up and has locked away certain memories. She says it all with such certainty that he generally just goes along with it and accepts it as truth. But he really does not know. And he does not feel sad about it the way that she feels sad.

“I bet you were so adorable, when you were young.”

It takes Grey Worm a beat, to realize that she is talking to him. She is talking about him.

He lifts his gaze to look at at her face — soft around the edges, kind of smiling — and his heart starts pounding in his chest.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey Worm continues to be self-involved and doesn't realize it's not cool to ghost a woman and his best friend the day after getting down with her. Missandei continues coming to terms with her supposed predatory nature and fulfilling her female destiny as the ruiner of good men. They both continue to exhibit a lot of hang-ups when it comes to sex!

 

 

**Day 1**

More than half of the Unsullied are staying behind in Meereen with Daario to ensure that Meereen doesn’t follow the paths of Yunkai and Astapor.

For this reason, Grey Worm spends his last morning in Meereen with Daario. It’s decidedly perfunctory and unsentimental, an information exchange of schedules, processes, and routines. They have already gone through it all in the week prior — ad nauseum — but Grey Worm tends to be overly comprehensive and, for once, Daario is indulging him. They both generally keep their focus. Though there are moments when Daario skirts of the edge of trying to make it more.

Daario casually says, “This might be the last time we ever see each other,” referring more to Grey Worm’s likelier death rather than his own. But then, one never truly knows.

There is a long pause, one in which Grey Worm is wondering what the point of this statement is, what the point is in stating facts. What he knows about Daario is that Daario is always hinting at what is unspoken — an irritating trait. Finally, Grey Worm says, “Yes.”

Daario releases a quiet puff of laughter. He says, “I will miss you, too. I will miss all of the jokes we’ve exchanged. I will miss your sunny disposition.”

Now Grey Worm knows he’s being mocked. He just stands there stiffly and wordlessly. He never knows what Daario expects for him to say in these moments.

He hears his name. He hears, “Torgo Nudho,” and both he and Daario turn around to find Missandei standing framed in the doorway. She dips her chin and apologetically says, “The queen wishes to speak with you.” She is telling him that it’s time to go. She nods politely at Daario and then, with a strange amount of austerity, she says, “It was a honor to have known you, Daario Naharis.”

He quickly smiles and just as fast, returns, “It was an honor to have known you, Missandei of Naath. I’m sorry I once held a knife to your throat. But I’m not sorry to have had the opportunity to hold you in my arms.”

Grey Worm and Missandei are now used to Daario’s inflections, the way he jokes. They can detect the jokes when they are being expressed. Neither of them think he’s very funny. Missandei responds to Daario by turning around and walking out of the room.

Next to Daario, Grey Worm straightens, preparing to follow her out — but then he feels Daario’s heavy hand on his shoulder. Grey Worm pauses — he expects another joke at his expense, probably another reminder about how he’s a eunuch and how the ships will be populated by eunuchs, and thus Missandei will be very safe from him because he is not a full man.

But Daario says, “You should tell her how you feel about her before it’s too late.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

He knows when he is irritating people. It’s not hard to detect. He irritates people all the time. But always for good reason. He is frustrated whenever they tell him that he is unnecessarily obsessed with what they call the Unsullied's well-earned leisured comforts.

It is frustrating to him when Daenerys’s face flips to irritation when, in the absence of actual reportable updates because space on the ships is so finite and there is not much to patrol, sequestered in the belly of the sea the way they are — Grey Worm launches into an impromptu diatribe about how the Unsullied just sit around all day. They eat too much of the rations. They have invented some game like they are children.

He is, in essence, venting.

And Daenerys sees it for what it is. She cuts off his angry speech and tells him, “I am not concerned that the Unsullied are playing games.” And then she adds, “What game is this? Is it easy to learn?”

From beside her, Tyrion’s grin widens.

Grey Worm spits out, “Unsullied eat too much. Unsullied linger too much. Unsullied joke too much. Unsullied too comfortable. Everyone will die because Unsullied are becoming fat and slow.” He flicks his eyes to Tyrion. “Like _them.”_

“That’s a bit rude,” Tyrion says, with a smirk and an air of calmness. Tyrion has astutely sussed out what is actually going on. Tyrion remembers last night. He remembers the way the two of them talked to one another. He had seen the way the two of them looked at each other. He had also seen how Missandei got up to stalk after him, once Grey Worm drunkenly left the table. Tyrion has accurately guessed that Grey Worm is having a whopper of a morning-after.

Out loud, Tyrion says, “If you are so jealous and feel so left out, just ask the others if they will let you join in on a few of the games.”

Grey Worm can’t navigate well through his pounding heading, so he falls for Tyrion’s baiting trap. His throbbing brain explodes in rage, and he petulantly yells, “I do not want to play _games!_ I hate _games!_ I hate your _games!”_

Tyrion’s eyes widen. Because he thinks this is amazing and hilarious.

“Quiet!” Daenerys snaps — before Tyrion can open his mouth for a retort.

And then they all realize, at the same time, that she is snapping at Grey Worm.

She herself looks rather stunned by this realization. She blinks a few times in shock. And then she opts to pretend she didn’t just shout at the commander of her army, and he didn’t just throw a temper tantrum like a baby. They are all contending with cabin fever on this ship.

Daenerys feels inexplicably embarrassed — just a little bit. It’s a feeling that she associates with youth, one that she no longer identifies with. To cover up and move on from this feeling of self-consciousness, she adjusts her voice, clears her throat, and calmly asks, “Incidentally, have either of you seen Missandei? Where is Missandei? I have not seen her this morning.”

Tyrion actually titters out a rather high-pitched, melodic laugh, making Grey Worm’s and Daenerys’ eyes shoot to his face. He raises his hand and explains, “She had a bit too much to drink last night, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen her this morning, but I’m sure she is fine. Have you seen her this morning?” Tyrion is addressing Grey Worm.

He hesitates. Because Tyrion’s a fucking ass, and Grey Worm has seen her this morning. He saw her in her room, where he had also slept. She was lying unconscious in her bed, on her back. The blanket was laid across her hips and she was not wearing _any_ clothes, so her body was exposed. The sun was especially bright. He felt awful — physically and also in his head, in his mind. He had overslept. He left her there, sleeping in her bed, naked.

He keeps pushing what he had done to her away. He doesn’t want to think about what it means for them. She must be awake now. She must hate him now because of what he has done to her.

He doesn’t lie to the queen. So, to Daenerys, he says, “Yes. I saw her. She is fine.”

Daenerys can tell there is something really odd going on.

 

 

  
**Day 4**

She’s tucked in a tight and dark little alcove, hiding from the bright sun, with a book that details the musculature and bones of whales — massive fish of the ocean. The information in the book was found through autopsy, through the systemic breakdown of the dead animals. It is utterly fascinating — and she’s been trying to savor each page because she has many, many days to wade through. In packing the ship, food rations, artillery, and weapons were prioritized first, naturally. She was judicious in choosing the books to take onboard — just a frivolous way to pass the time. She felt bad about it initially — initially opting to leave it all behind. But Daenerys urged her to take a few items of comfort. They are about to leave for a very strange and foreign land. There should be something that reminds them of home.

Which is a concept that is always out of Missandei’s reach.

She’s so engrossed in the book that she doesn’t hear the droning low conversations of the Unsullied, walking back and forth on the deck. It’s not until she hears a couple of them talking about Eamon and about his Kira that her ears perk up and she starts actively eavesdropping.

The first Unsullied, whose deep voice Missandei recognizes the sound of — Lightning — is critical of Eamon. He is saying that Eamon gradually stopped drinking the wine of courage, and he stopped worshipping the goddess. Eamon is no longer favored. This is why he will die swiftly in battle. This is why he has been ruined and made weak — this is why he associated with that woman and was susceptible to her poison.

Lightning is one of the more experienced and older Unsullied. She remembers Grey Worm’s characterization of Lightning. They had a conversation about this once. Grey Worm conveyed to her that Lightning is sometimes bothersome to him. He struggled to explain it to her in the Common Tongue, so he resorted to Low Valyrian. He told her that Lightning is perhaps too old to still be a soldier — and perhaps will always have one foot back in how it was. She remembers telling him that the word he was searching for is perhaps conservatism, or just being a little old-fashioned.

She also had trouble finding the word for it — something that surprised and looked like it troubled Grey Worm — the limits of her knowledge and intelligence. Grey Worm then wryly wondered out loud where old Unsullied go when they outlive their usefulness. They haven’t had to contend with this yet — aging out of being a soldier. Usually they just die before it comes up.

The other Unsullied, whose voice Missandei does not recognize, speaks. He sounds younger. In Low Valyrian, his voice is casual and a little dull as he points out that their commander has also stopped drinking the wine of courage — on the day that they were freed. Perhaps their commander has also stopped worshipping the goddess, because their commander is attached to the translator.

Missandei freezes as her face grows hot. She holds her breath. They are talking about her.

Lightning actually then admonishes the younger Unsullied, swiftly and harshly. He tells the younger man to never speak that way about their commander ever again. He tells the younger man that if he has any doubts about their commander, then he should just throw himself into the water and die today.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

It takes him too long to figure out that drinking an excessive amount of wine doesn’t really punish Tyrion at all — it actually makes Tyrion happy. Grey Worm is making Tyrion happy. And it is fucking terrible and not what he intended at all.

Tyrion likes to wax poetics on wine. He’s swaying in his seat, he’s holding up his glass, he’s calling it his one true friend in the cold, dark world. He then abruptly stops his train of thought as he stares at Missandei’s face, which is smiling and pressed into her hand. Tyrion says to her, “I’m sorry — I completely forgot what I was saying. Because you are so beautiful. You know that about yourself, right? You must.”

She laughs in shock — whether it’s shock that Tyrion is being so honest and bold, or shock because she doesn’t see herself as beautiful — Grey Worm doesn’t know. His face is throbbing, and his mind is foggy — this wine is much different from the wine of courage, but also a little bit the same — and he _hates_ that it’s a little bit the same. Maybe it’s all the fucking same.

It’s different, though, because this wine makes his heart pound. It makes him hyper aware of his heart, rather than detached from it. He feels bad — inside of himself — and this is also how this wine differs from the wine of courage. He feels weak — inside of himself — and sentimental. This is probably why Tyrion isn’t a soldier or a fighter. Because he drinks this wine too much. And he is a dwarf and lacks the stature and strength. But then, Grey Worm also has his own kinds of deficiencies and also lacks stature and strength.

Shit. Is he the same as the dwarf?

Her giggling yanks him outside of his own head. He watches her as she laughs over something that isn’t altogether very funny. She laughs with greater frequency when she drinks wine. He doesn’t necessarily agree or approve of this behavior, but perhaps his own actions are sometimes out of his control. Perhaps he drinks because she is drinking. He finds her happiness to be incredibly addictive and necessary. It makes him feel sick inside sometimes — a lot of the time. It makes him feel sick inside that she thinks Tyrion is so funny. It makes him feel sick inside to think that she might go to bed with Tyrion because — despite what Tyrion lacks in stature and in strength — he can still be with women. He can still be with _her_.

Grey Worm knows that his current preoccupation is so wrong and so grotesque. He’s been so angry at himself. He’s been close to drinking the wine of courage again. He tried to burn up all of the stores of it after he was instated as commander of the Unsullied, but Hero convinced him not to do that. Hero had pleaded with him and made a case for the nature of freedom and of choice.

He blinks hard when Tyrion reaches out and snaps his fingers in front of Grey Worm’s face. Tyrion asutely says, “Don’t be jealous.” And then he grins and adds, “I think you are very pretty too — especially when you smile.”

Grey Worm’s scowl only deepens.

This makes Missandei laugh even harder, which was probably Tyrion’s intent.

“He’s a pretty boy, isn’t he?” Tyrion asks her. “He could’ve been a very pretty boy under different circumstances.”

“Yes. He’s a very pretty man,” Missandei says, holding back more laughter.

“My mistake. You are right. He is a man.”

Grey Worm thinks that while Tyrion’s constant mockery of him is a bit of an annoyance — it actually makes him feel . . . turbulent inside when he hears mockery from her. She typically never mocks him. He will blame this on this fucking shitty wine. All drink is fucking shitty and terrible.

And then he accidentally looks up and he catches her staring at him. He sees her lick her lips as she stares at him. He sees her staring at him for a really long moment, with this quiet tension in her face. His heart just _pounds_ hard in his chest — and this is not the wine — as she looks back at him with this . . . raw neediness.

He nervously picks up his glass of wine and swallows down the rest of the contents.

He hears Tyrion say, “Fuck. Yes.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

She spent the morning vomiting out liquid, old wine, and bile. Her entire body shakes from dehydration as she speed-walks down the corridor, intent on getting to Daenerys fast so that she can apologize for her absence this morning.

The ship is claustrophobically tight, but she doesn’t run into Grey Worm at all. She can’t decide if she is angry at him or if she’s just humiliated and thus, angry at herself.

She doesn’t think there is anything particular amiss about her appearance — she took great care to look like she always does because she doesn’t want anyone to know what has happened and how she is feeling — when she intersects Tyrion, right in front of the door that leads to the meeting room. He gives her a big, calculated smile.

He says, “Oh, we were all wondering where you were. Sleep well?”

She intends to be haughty and to make him feel silly. But instead, she starts tearing up, right in front of him. She starts to cry because she woke up alone. Grey Worm probably hates her and doesn’t want to be her friend anymore. This entire situation is very embarrassing. Tyrion probably knows everything. He saw her embarrass herself. He saw her leave the table to follow Grey Worm. He must somehow know that it is very hard to love her.

Tyrion sees her tears and his expression drops into seriousness. His voice is low as he says, “Hey, there there. There’s nothing to cry about.”

She reaches her hand up to swipe at her eyes. She admits, “I feel really bad.”

Tyrion winces. He says, “Ah, I shouldn’t have let you two drink so much — you’re beginners, after all. I should’ve stopped you after a certain point. You know — let’s go get you some water. That will make you feel better. Daenerys can wait.”

 

 

  
**Day 12**

Because there are only two women on the ship — Missandei and Daenerys — cooking duties get spread out. It would be impossible for their queen to be stationed at a hearth for hours of the day, churning out meals for all of them. The very thought makes him shudder.

And it is unfair to expect Missandei to make all of the meals. So he initially just told Great White to do it. But then Hero, once again, reminded him of the nature of freedom and choice — and so Grey Worm allowed a volunteer system. It ended up working well.

He took Dogkiller’s spot today — to the irritation of Dogkiller because apparently, he likes to make food — because Grey Worm is just so fucking bored. He’s so fucking tired of looking at endless water that he decides to change his routine by doing this menial shit.

He’s actually really bad at it, which makes sense because he has never actually done it before — because this is women’s work — and he has never paid attention to anyone who has done it. He assumes that it’s not difficult. Just make a fire. Just throw food onto the fire. He is not concerned with palatability at all.

“Torgo Nudho, you need help,” she says, materializing next to him. Apparently, she has been watching him drag over buckets of dead fish that they have caught, and she has been watching him hack away at the poor dead fish with his dirty knife, from the deck above. She gently takes his knife out of his hand.

“This one doesn't need —” He cuts himself off in agitation. “I — don’t need help.”

“Look at yourself,” she says, gesturing to his body.

He is covered with fish entrails and blood. He looks down at himself. He says, “Yes, what?”

“You have a mess all over you,” she says fondly.

He shrugs. “I’ll clean later.”

“Can I show you?”

It’s one of those phrases she used to repeat a lot — when she was teaching him the Common Tongue. She used to ask him his permission and his consent a lot, in the course of teaching him.

He sighs. He always has the same answer to this question. This time, the sun is hot and the context is different. He still says, “Yes.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

“So let’s get serious for a moment here,” Tyrion says, grinning at his two companions at the table. “I have a serious question here. Many inquiries have been made — I will not betray confidences and tell you who has inquired, but trust me — inquiries have been made.” Tyrion pauses for dramatic effect, snorting a little bit from holding back laughter. “Grey Worm, what is going on in your pants?”

Missandei’s eyes widen — as she generally stops herself from reaching out, grabbing Tyrion by the front of his shirt, and choking him to death. Grey Worm — having taken in more than an entire bottle of wine — is slow and does not understand what is being asked at first. He approaches the question literally and looks down at his pants. He says, “My pants?”

“Yes,” Tyrion says, trying to muster up some semblance of seriousness. “Your pants.”

And after that, Missandei really does reach out to grab him. She stands up, braces one hand against the table top as the other dashes forward and buries itself in his shirt. Tyrion finds that she is surprisingly strong and stands up out of his seat so she doesn’t rip or stretch his shirt too much.

At his face, she looks very grave and very serious as she says, “Tyrion. _Don’t_ say another _fucking_ word.”

It’s such a novelty to hear Missandei curse. So he starts to laugh again.

And she shakes him, so that he will take her seriously.

Grey Worm is bewildered by what is going on in front of him — and excited by it. He’s a person that has been created at the altar of violence and pain. He used to worship at the altar of a deity of violence and pain. He had given himself and his humanity over to her. And after he was freed, the first wave of disgust rolled over him.

It’s difficult to escape origins though. As much as he can reject her, over and over again — consciously — his subconscious remains problematic. Sometimes the way he feels about violence — or the threat of it — is as close to arousal as he can get.

He sees Missandei — gentle, peaceful Missandei — with her fist in Tyrion’s shirt and her angry face staring down Tyrion’s face — and Grey Worm feels such urgency in how he needs her and wants her and desires her.

 

 

 


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Missandei gets to have an O. Yay for Missy!

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Instead of going straight to the rain barrels as Missandei expected, Tyrion takes her back down to the storage rooms. She watches him wordlessly as he pulls out _another_ bottle of wine. Then he gathers salt fish, vinegar, and some dry biscuits. He looks around for rat droppings and, finding none, looks satisfied as he loads the food stuffs into his arm and carries them up on deck.

She follows him.

Outside in the sun, he tells her, “Now this is imperfect because of the limitation of our supplies, but I know just the thing that will make you feel better.”

As he starts mixing together his hair of the dog concoction, he is pointedly assuming that her ailment is solely physical. He starts mashing the salt fish into a cup that he fills with wine.

Her stomach turns, and her hand goes up to her face to cover her mouth.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

He stands up and announces to them that he needs to take a piss — the bluntness of it makes the both of them straighten in their seats. His chair scrapes against the floorboards as he gets to his feet. And as he sways on his feet, he tells them that it’s late and he should actually just retire and go to bed. Without looking at her face, he stiffly wishes her a good night. And then he retroactively realizes he should wish the same to the dwarf. He nods at Tyrion, who just salutes him with a glass of wine.

Grey Worm has taken five steps and is ascending the steps when she also stands up. She is also a little unsteady on her feet. Her face is hot and sweaty, and all she is thinking to herself is that her preferred person just left. She would rather continue talking with Grey Worm than continue talking with Tyrion, who likes to commandeer conversations and who is not generous about listening to her speak.

She announces, “I will also be going to bed.”

Tyrion stares at her for a targeted moment, amusement in his eyes — before he just blandly tells her, “Good night,” before reaching out to pull the wine bottle closer to his cup. He adds, “I’m going to stay up for a bit.”

 

 

  
**Day 1**

She has never been on a ship like this before — besides when she was ripped from her home and stolen away to be sold as a slave. More accurately, she has never been on a ship this big, for this reason. She has traveled by boat for short distances.

The seasickness occurs nearly instantaneously. Being below deck exacerbates the nausea. Being above deck is marginally better, but she feels like she is in the way.

Because her focus has been on bigger things, the logistics of being sequestered on a ship for long weeks were not something she thought about deeply.

Having nothing to do herself, Daenerys applies extra focus onto Missandei. She insists that Missandei drink water spiked with a little bit of vinegar to help with the nausea.

After four hours on the ship — after drinking more than six cups of water — Missandei realizes that she has a problem. She needs to go.

She feels embarrassment and very shy as she quietly confesses this to Daenerys, who blithely problem-solves for Missandei and tells her to go to the head of the ship and just pee there. For reasons that are somewhat unclear to Missandei, Daenerys is rarely afflicted by a sense of shame or by a desire toward modesty. Like Daenerys, Missandei has also suffered certain indignities or abuses under men. However, she is still self-conscious about her body and its functions.

With a little of amusement — because Daenerys has noted Missandei’s shyness — Daenerys says that perhaps they can spare a bucket and Missandei can go in that. They can have one of the Unsullied dump it out into the sea afterward.

Missandei miserably hates the very thought. She doesn’t want to make the Unsullied do unclean work because she is weak. She also doesn’t want for any of the Unsullied to see her waste. It is still embarrassing. She realizes she can dump out her own bucket, but then it seems excessively troublesome work just to preserve her modesty — and for what? She is on a ship full of castrated men. They probably do not even care.

After she talks herself into it, so much time has passed that her bladder feels stretched, tight, and in urgent need of expelling. She still has to contend with her nausea on top of it. Tears break out of her eyes — not from sadness or even humiliation, but from just feeling so awful already and feeling sorry for herself because it probably will not get much better after this. It will probably get worse, being stuck on this ship.

She scurries to the head of the ship, covering her mouth and nose with her hand because it already smells like urine here and her stomach is so sensitive right now. She actually runs into Grey Worm there — or actually, he follows her there because he saw her odd gait from afar and was concerned.

He says, “Missandei, are you hurt?”

She says, “Ah, I need to pee. Sorry.” She is undoing her pants with one hand pretty frantically. She means sorry she cannot talk to him right now. She also means she’s sorry that she is doing this in front of him. It is terrible for her, too.

He blinks and then immediately turns around. And then he starts walking backwards — following the sound of her peeing.

In panic, she says, “What are you doing?” as he closes in on her. And then she realizes that she can’t see the rest of the ship — he has blocked her view. And he is blocking her from sight, mostly. She says, “Oh. Thank you.” And then she winces because the sound of urination is really just _thunderous_ in her ears. She tries to make conversation. She says, “How are you? How do you like being on a ship?” She feels so embarrassed.

He says, “It’s fine.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

As he pees, he stiffens when he detects that someone is hovering. He is slow at detecting because he is drunk. He looks over his shoulder and he spots her hair, her curls, and then he incrementally relaxes. She quietly waits her turn. He’s looking out to the dark sea — so close to the edge to try and keep the ship a little more sanitary — and she knows he’s done when he hops a little bit and starts pulling at the waistband of his pants.

She thinks it is really, really adorable and cute — how he does that. She thinks that it’s adorable and cute when his nose wrinkles and flares when he’s pissed off. She thinks it’s incredibly mind-numbingly adorable and cute, the way he walks around the ship with his hands clasped behind his back. She can watch him for hours. Sometimes — often — she thinks he’s so adorable and cute that she wants to get naked with him and see what’s underneath his clothes and just touch and kiss _everything._

Her face is so hot — even though the night air is cool.

When it’s her turn, she walks to the smelly, slatted deck, and she starts to undo her pants. She pushes them down. She squats. And then the boat drops and tilts right, and she loses her balance and slams her shoulder right into the side of the ship. She yelps out a squeak. He does not budge from where he is stationed to help her — because he wants to maintain her privacy and not make her feel uncomfortable or threatened.

He just says, “Missandei — do you need help?”

She rights herself and widens her squat. She says, “Only if you want to help me.”

This statement results in intense silence.

She laughs. Then she says, “I’m all right.” She boldly faces him as she starts emptying out her bladder. She says, “Wine makes you need to go more than water does, doesn’t it?”

He says, “Yes,” with his face pointed to where the horizon should be.

“Are you going straight to bed?” she asks. “I mean, right now? I mean, are you tired, right now? I mean —” She clears her rambling throat. “Do you want to talk with me some more? I mean, after I am done going? I mean, just the two of us — not with Tyrion anymore. We can go to my room?”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Missandei gags at first sip. She pulls the cup away from her face and says, “This is wretched.”

Tyrion encouraging pushes the cup closer to her face and says, “Drink it. It will make you feel better.”

She uneasily says, “I don’t think it will.”

He patiently says, “Missandei, I think I’d know. I’ve been drinking since you were still sucking on your mother’s teat.”

She says, “I don’t think the math adds up with that.”

He says, “I started young.”

She cautiously tilts the cup back — gets a whiff of it — plugs her nose — and then sucks down a substantial gulp. And then she chokes on it and starts gagging again, grabbing onto a railing so that she doesn’t fall over.

This is the sight that Grey Worm and Daenerys come across when they climb above deck — they see Tyrion looking up at Missandei encouragingly. They see Missandei take a sip from her cup with effort that looks agonizing. And then they see her double over and fight not to vomit as Tyrion cheerily looks on and claps his hands in pride.

“Rough night?” Daenerys asks when she is in earshot. She has a brow quirked up and she is trying to get a look at the chunky sludge that is in the cup.

Missandei locks eyes with him — and upon first sight — in daylight like this with her body just miserable and her heart just humiliated — she discovers that she is actually really, really angry with him for leaving her without saying goodbye. She clenches her jaw. She says, “Yes. Very rough night.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

They reach the door to her room entirely too soon. Her hands are alternating between grabbing onto his wrists and pressing up against his chest — in an exaggerated show of keeping herself upright. She keeps laughing at the expression on his face — he looks really stressed. He keeps gently pulling her hands off of his body and returning them to her sides. He keeps his voice low, and he keeps telling her what she already knows — they drank too much. And it was a mistake to have had too much to drink.

She doesn’t think so. She thinks that drinking so much has made her brave. She unlocks the door to her room — he furtively looks around, down the darken hallways because he’s nervous someone will catch them like this. He already has the sense that what they are doing together is something that is bad and inappropriate, so he is already scared of being caught and then reprimanded for it. He’s scared of her being taken away from him because of something bad they have done. He cannot even begin to express this to her, because her hands comes up to his arms, she’s giggling attractively, and then she’s yanking him backward into her room.

After the door is shut and locked behind him, she can see his entire body visibly tighten. He takes in a deep breath as he stares at her. He is hazy to her eyes — her cheeks feel hot — the nerve-endings in her body manage to be hyper alert — and she has been thinking about him all day.

A short whimper escapes out of her lips as she advances on him, right before she pulls his face and mouth down over hers.

 

 

  
**Day 7**

Overnight, they cast a net out smeared with salt fish to see what they can catch. In the morning, he’s barefoot and taking off his clothes so that they don’t get soaked with salt water. He strips down to his underwear and leaves his clothes with Eamon. Eamon is being punished for being overly emotional, so Eamon is not allowed to be very useful. Eamon gets to be in charge of holding onto things.

Grey Worm and Dogkiller climb down the side of the ship to retrieve the net. Missandei is watching them from high above — which he ignores because her attention is distracting sometimes.

A violent splash of water hits them — soaking them — and they grasp onto rope to avoid being pulled into the ocean. He and Dogkiller wordlessly work, as years of knowing one another and training together has created an attuned and accurate style of wordless communication. They pull up the net, bit by bit with the aid of a hook on deck. From the first pull, Grey Worm can see that it is not good.

In the end, there are half a dozen crabs, many small, and also a few grotesque looking sea worms — sea mud creatures. Dogkiller remarks that they are out too far — the ocean is too deep here.

They dump their haul into smaller nets, drop the big one back into the ocean, and they climb back up the ship, wet and sticky with salt.

On the top deck, Grey Worm drops the haul in front of Hero’s feet — who kind of recoils at the sight of the fat sea worms. He’s never seen anything like them.

In Low Valyrian, Grey Worm tells Hero to cook the sea animals to see if they are edible or poisonous. He tells Hero to test the animal on Eamon before giving to others. If Eamon dies, then no one should eat this.

It’s actually a joke. Grey Worm really does want for them to cook it, but he wants for them to try to feed the animal to rats first, before people. And they know this. Eamon still balks and says that he is not eating the squirming, slimy thing. He casually says he’s not ready to die just yet.

Grey Worm sardonically smiles, then asks Eamon just what he even has to live for. Eamon is pretty used to being the ass of all of the jokes, so he just shrugs. Then he looks up to the sky. He asks them if they know if the dragons are hungry. He hypothetically asks them if they think the dragons will eat Unsullied if the dragons starve long enough — or if dragons will just die before eating Unsullied. He is really asking about the extent of their devoutness and their devotion to the queen. He is trying to compare it to his own piety.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

There’s a part of him that knows that he should put a stop to this because this is very bad — but she groans against his mouth and she slips her tongue inside his mouth — she tastes like salt and wine and spit — and his face feels like it’s on fire — and his heart pounds hard.

They neatly fall back onto her bed, with her taking him there.

It’s been a terrifying blur of activity and of feelings — he finds himself shutting his eyes to her, so that he doesn’t have to witness the ever-changing flickering emotions on her face. He feels her hands shake as she finally pushes them down, leaving his face and shoulders. He accidentally presses himself against her body, and her mouth goes soft and slack against his lips. She drops her head backwards onto the bed and releases a quiet moan and a gasp.

He happens to see this unfold in front of his face. He happens to hear the sounds slip out of her very clearly. It makes his chest constrict. It makes him want more of this from her — a lot more. It makes him want to take off her clothes. It makes him want to press into her again.

So he does. He grabs her leg — it feels so forward — he orients it so her body is a little bit more open to him. For a moment, he feels really fucking self-conscious and stupid. He feels like he’s just faking this because that is all he can do for her — as he grinds himself in between her legs.

A part of him really expects for her to respond with disgust or maybe confusion or maybe nothing at all — or maybe even fucking sympathy and pity — but instead she lets out another womanly gasp — and her face is concentrated and also tense as she digs her fingers into his back, presses down hard, and repeats the motion. She groans again. She looks up at him in wonderment.

He doesn’t know if the way he feels inside is in response to her noises and her face and the gift that she is giving to him — or if the way he feels inside is actually completely divorced from her. He doesn’t know if this neediness in him is how other men feel when they are with women.

She continues rocking herself against him. She continues making these sounds that drive him nuts. She looks like she wants to talk to him — and she’s not sure if people are allowed to talk in moments like these.

She groans and then whimpers during a particularly firm connection. Her eyes quickly cast down to the dark space in between their bodies — where they are touching. She then pulls her eyes back up to look at his face.

And then she immediately starts crying — her eyes fill up with tears as she looks up at him.

It’s completely alarming and concerning. He’s sure he has really fucked up, and she is hurt or scared of him. He starts to scramble and lift himself from her. He’s such a fucking idiot.

She says, “No!” as she digs her nails into his shoulder, as her hips follow his retreat, as she clenches her thighs tighter around his body. She whispers, “Please don’t stop. This feels really good.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Lightning tells them that they are about an hour away from docking at the island. He smiles at them as he announces this. They are all so excited to step foot on land for a bit — to restore their supplies — to eat fresh food for the first time in weeks — to be able to clean themselves and get rid of the salt-derived itchiness.

Tyrion says, “Fantastic. We can buy more wine.” He gestures to Grey Worm and Missandei. “You two would like that, wouldn’t you?”

It’s a joke. But Grey Worm can tell that — as anticipated — Missandei hates him now. It is so fucking upsetting and terrible. He will never fucking touch wine ever again. It has ruined him once. He will not let it continue to fucking ruin him and take from his meager fucking life. He has fucking lost her.

Missandei says, “Shut your mouth, Tyrion.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

They continue pressing and rocking into each other. It ebbs and flows much like the water. They settle on a rhythm, based on her directives. She whispers to him with tears in her eyes that it feels nice when it’s firm and comprehensive, when it goes up and down. She’s afraid to ask him how it even feels for him — and he’s not volunteering any information — so she just focuses on herself.

She is pretty sure that she loves him. She knows that she’s really, really in love with him. She just wants to be with him. She just wants to feel — for a moment — that they are not all going to die soon — that the threat of death is not hanging over their heads — that she’s not going to lose him forever soon. She just wants to have a moment of not worrying about any of the things outside of this room. She just wants to be a woman that gets to be with the man that she loves.

She thinks that she is probably not doing this correctly. They still have their clothes on. All accounts that she is familiar with tell her that people are naked when they have sex. However, she is too nervous and too scared of losing this by taking a break to take off their clothes. She wills herself to be courageous and brave — she shuts her eyes as she lets her hands wander. She touches his head, his neck, his cheek, and then she runs her hands over his back and his spine. She digs her palms into muscle. He feels substantial and strong and masculine under her touch.

And then she plants her hands right on his butt. She’s just embarrassed right away, but she commits to it anyway. She shuts her eyes, digs her fingers into his bottom. He hiccups in his movement because he’s surprised, too. And then she quietly cries out — because she can guide his body this way. She can show him how to move so that it feels good for her this way.

She groans again — he has been deathly quiet — she’s the one making an embarrassing amount of noises — and she whispers a very helpless, _“Fuck,”_ in his ear. She also just goes for broke and confesses, “You feel so good. I want to keep going. I just don’t want this to end.”

It actually does end — eventually, after long minutes. The event is completely shocking to the both of them. She has been oppressed and victimized so she has never touched herself, and she has forced herself to maintain a certain naivete and innocence when it comes to sex because she doesn’t think that she should let them just take _everything_ from her. He has always had the staunch belief that he is subhuman, designed for only one purpose in life — and it is not _this_ — so he has shoved a lot of the thoughts out of his mind for years — except for recently, when he has nervously thought about sex _a lot._

As she gets closer to an orgasm, instinct takes over. She grinds herself against him harder because it feels so good. It aches and it tingles, and she finds that when she rubs herself against him, it simultaneously alleviates and builds on the ache. She starts getting louder and less self-conscious. She starts to qualify what they are doing as “fucking.” She tells him that she needs it harder and faster. He is mesmerized and he does not even know what the fuck he is looking at or what is happening. It is noisy and the bed creaks and the sheets rustle — and her hand reaches up to push against the wall for leverage. She keeps saying his name with such tension in her voice. She keeps encouraging him by saying, _“Yesss.”_

To her, her orgasm comes suddenly — but only because she didn’t expect it. Her eyes fly open as she starts gasping for breath as something inside of her breaks and rolls out in really pleasurable waves. She becomes excessively uncontrolled and her teeth mindlessly latches onto his neck — she bites down hard as her body just continues pulling and pushing out every last bit of this.

After it is done, her face is wet, and she’s really sensitive down there. So she twists her hips and squeezes her knees together to break his rhythm.

He looks confused and also expectant — he is waiting for her to say something.

She’s panting. She feels like she has learned something — about him, about them, about what they are capable of.

She starts pulling at his clothes. She starts taking them off of his body. She has decided that she needs to see him.

 

 

 

 


	4. four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Targaryen visit a brothel in Grey Worm's hometown!

 

 

 

**Day 14**

As the city of Lotus Point comes into view, Daenerys announces that she also wants to leave the ship to take a short trek onto the island. Tyrion decides that this development — the presence of the queen — would prevent him from fully enjoying himself in this place that Varys has described as a culture that worships a fertility goddess with sixteen teats. Because he’s been sequestered on a ship of made up of mostly castrated men for the last two weeks — Tyrion does not think he wants a chaperone or to play tour guide to a place that he is entirely unfamiliar with. He says, “My queen, perhaps you would be more comfortable staying on board the ship? The sun is blistering hot on land, and there’s a nice breeze coming up from the ocean, on the ship.”

“I will go on land,” Daenerys says firmly, narrowing her eyes at him. Then she nods at Grey Worm — because Grey Worm is required to accompany the queen everywhere she goes. It’s his own rule. Then, Daenerys lightly reaches out and touches Missandei’s forearm. Missandei is also going on land. Daenerys needs Missandei to translate even though she has not confirmed that this is one of the 19 languages she knows. Daenerys more or less assumes that Missandei knows every useful language.

Tyrion looks at the intimidating fleet behind them, absently wondering what the inhabitants of this city must think when they look out of their windows.

Yara and Theon are already waiting for them on the dock. Yara has her hips cocked, her arms crossed over her chest, and a smirk growing over her face. The first thing that comes out of her mouth is a laugh — she laughs when she sees Missandei trip over her own wobbly feet and collapse onto the ground in a heap.

As a nearby Unsullied — Hero — reaches down to help Missandei back to her feet, Yara simply says, “Land sickness. You’ll get used to it. Just in time to get right back on a boat. Don’t you just fucking love it?”

It’s a tough crowd. Not even a smile.

Yara shifts her focus. She looks at Tyrion. She spits out some mucus from the back of her throat before she says, “I hear the prostitutes here are legendary. This is a culture that treats love-making as a holy act. Do you want to visit the brothels before or after the market?”

Tyrion laughs into his fist — he covers it up with a cough. His voice is tight and high from holding back his amusement as he says, “Perhaps after. After would be fine.” He looks around at the half dozen or so Unsullied who have left the ship to accompany their queen ashore. He casts a glance at Grey Worm and smiles. Tyrion says, “Does everyone agree? After? Yes?”

 

 

  
**Day 10**

As day breaks, as the waters calm, as the sun rises and the first meager light rays trickle through the glass window, she can see the individual features of Eamon’s face again. The ship is now rocking gently from side to side — a marked and sickly change from the night before.

She is sitting on the floor, wedged between the mattress and the corner of the wall. Eamon is across the room, sitting in front of the door with his feet braced against the floor. His spear rests behind his feet. She remembers initially seeing the spear and thinking that it was all wrong — a spear is nothing against an angry wall of water and deafening winds. But then she realized that the spear wasn’t for the ocean — it was for her. His directive was to keep her down, by whatever means necessary, even if it meant incapacitating her.

She hasn’t said a word to him in hours. The last words she said to him were emotional and a little cruel because she was so angry and scared that she was being locked in a room, away from everyone else.

A soft knock on the other side of the door an hour later signals for Eamon to stand up. He gestures for her to do the same. She presses her lips into a thin line — momentarily thinking of being defiant — but she quickly decides against it. She pushes her sore, tired body into standing position. She licks her chapped lips, and she touches the wall for balance.

There is no one on the other side when Eamon opens the door. He exits out, expecting her to follow, which she does.

When the full force of the rising sun hits her face — her eyes burn and she blinks against the light. She raises her hand to cover her face. She looks up to the clear blue skies — she sees Drogon. She flutters her eyes open and shut a few times to clear out the blur — and then she spots Daenerys on Drogon. Daenerys is surveying the status of her fleet from the sky.

Missandei sees him from afar. He and Tyrion are standing on a Greyjoy ship, speaking with Yara Greyjoy. Neither appear to be hurt. He sees her staring at him — and he acknowledges her with a nod.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

They need to restore provisions of fresh water, wine — because potable water stagnates quickly whereas wine does not — along with dried peas, animal fat, candles, among many other things. The process of bartering and paying for goods is a rather tedious one, and Missandei feels especially self-conscious over how long it is taking. Her command of the language is unfortunately not that strong — and Daenerys, Grey Worm, and the other Unsullied are patient with waiting, but they also like to wait by standing around her and staring blatantly at the conversation she is having with every shopkeeper. Tyrion is the only one with the social grace to wander around and pretend to look at things as she struggles with language.

She is trying to explain to the shopkeeper that she’d like sour milk, for instance, not fresh milk. Adding an adjective in front of milk does not help clarify what she wants. Daenerys is watching her flail attentively — not with judgement, but Missandei is projecting that onto herself. She feels ashamed and tired as she keeps trying to think of synonyms for sour. This is the only thing she is good at. This is the only thing that gives her value and worth. And she is not doing it well at all.

“Aoyahi cede.”

She snaps her eyes over to look at Grey Worm — who looks very tense, upset, and uncomfortable with his own utterance.

The shopkeeper says, “Ah!” in immediate understanding. Then the shopkeeper looks Grey Worm up and down a few times before smiling and saying a lot of things in rapid-fired Summer Tongue. Missandei can pick out about half of it — the woman thinks Grey Worm looks familiar. She thinks his accent is very, very striking. She is wondering out loud of he knows someone — if he knows a particular family here. She tells him that he carries a resemblance to people on this island.

He appears as if he does not understand what the shopkeeper is saying to him.

After exchanging money for the supplies, after Missandei nervously deflects all of the shopkeeper’s questions about Grey Worm — when they are standing outside underneath the hot sun — Tyrion asks Grey Worm, “How did you know that? The word?”

Grey Worm says, “I am from here.”

Tyrion softly says, “Oh, I did not know that. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that you would be _from somewhere._ Perhaps because you were a slave, and we just don’t think about slaves that way.”

Grey Worm looks at Tyrion with agitation clearly written on his face.

Tyrion points at Grey Worm. “You are not an innocent in all of this. How long have we known each other now? I have told you so many stories about Casterly Rock. How many stories have _you_ told _me_ about how you traipsed around the Summer Isles as a young, free lad? Yes. Exactly none.”

“Tyrion,” Missandei says menacingly, stepping forward toward him with her fists balled up by her sides. _“Stop.”_

Tyrion holds up his hands in a peacemaking gesture. He says, “My apologies. I did not mean to offend.”

 

 

**Day 12**

He makes really quick work of gutting the fish after she shows him how. He holds down a live, squirming fish, slides his knife into its belly, slices it open, and squints his eyes so that the blood splatter doesn’t temporarily blind him. The dying fish is still spasming as Grey Worm reaches into the belly and starts ripping and scooping out entrails into a bucket, which will used as bait for the net. He separates roe into a second bucket.

She also teaches him how to trim and scale a fish, which he picks up quickly. He’s fantastic with a knife, and he also has a tendency to do things as fast as humanly possible — he feels a sense of urgency with everything. The only time she can recall that he didn’t blow through a lesson was in the language lessons. He lingered there.

He separates the meat from the bones so that they can preserve the meat in salt. He dumps the carcasses into a heating pot of water for soup. By the time he is done with the work, everything looks really pristine and orderly actually — except for him.

She wants to laugh when she looks at him. His face is stained with dried blood.

“What is funny?” he asks, dunking his knives into salt water to clean them off.

“You’re a mess,” she says.

He looks down at himself — she follows his gaze down to his pants. He shrugs. And then he swings his eyes up to her. He says, “I’ll wash.”

She has caught her eyes, many times, actually drifting to his pants. She has discovered that — like with many other things — she has developed a tolerance through practice and acclimation. She is slightly less condemning of how obsessed she is with his anatomy. She has told herself that this must be how men feel about women — and the urge in them is so great that this is why men rape. She has told herself that — at the very least — her debasement of him is quiet, silent, and private. She is not as fucking terrible as to act on how she feels and what she wants from him. She is at least better than that.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

His heart is throbbing in his throat and his mind is frozen as her hands attack his body, as her hands start tugging and pulling and undressing him. She’s lit by candlelight and kind of like a fuzzy mirage hovering over him — and he releases a soft gasp when her palms press down on the bare skin of his chest.

She scoots backwards, still straddling him. Her frantic hands go to the closure and ties of his pants. Her fingers are trying to undo knots. Her face is screwed up in concentration.

It’s when he feels her pulling apart the first barrier that he reaches down and tightly grabs her wrists. He blinks rapidly at the ceiling, because he can’t look at her face. He can’t really stand to see the horror and disappointment in her face — because the facts haven’t changed. Their circumstances haven’t changed. He has not changed. He says, “No.”

Her tense body incrementally relaxes. She sounds disappointed as she says, “No?”

“No,” he confirms.

She says, “All right.”

This is when he lets go of her hands — because he trusts that she is not lying to him.

His pants go unaccosted. Instead, he sees her lean toward him, with a hand anchored to the mattress. She asks, “Can I lie down next to you?”

He wonders if she will rub herself on him again, if she will start moaning and gasping out his name again — if she will ever explain to him what just happened between the two of them. He says, “Yes.”

 

 

  
**Day 1**

Grey Worm discovers that fifteen barrels of the wine of courage have been loaded onto all Unsullied ships after he explicitly dictated only ten. He angrily confronts Hero about his defiance and demands that Hero remove seven barrels from all ships — they are losing two for their insolence.

Yara swats her hand back and casually smacks Missandei right in the breast and asks, “What are they arguing about?”

Missandei is disturbed by the familiarity. She carefully presses her hand on her chest, where Yara hit her. Reluctantly — because she does not think she should serve as a translator for _everyone_ — she sternly says, “They are arguing about . . . provisions. The amount of it. The commander prefers a lighter ship.”

Yara releases a loud laugh stemming from the belly. She walks over and knocks her shoulder with Grey Worm — who glares at her. Being Ironborn, Yara finds everything about the Unsullied — their hyper-discipline, their inability to fuck, their lack of personality, emotion, and feeling, their general lack of humanity — to be strange, foreign, and very amusing. Her men have spent the last few weeks teaching and training the Unsullied and Dothraki how to sail. The Unsullied were very quick studies compared to the Dothraki, who are just a bunch of defiant fuckshows. The Unsullied take in every word and every demonstration deeply — they generally need to only be shown things once. But in the water, knowledge doesn’t amount to shit compared to experience. Yara knows this.

She tells Grey Worm, “Heavy ships are good ships. Without sufficient ballast, a ship has a very wicked roll to it. I've been on ships that whipped across to thirty degrees heel on the other side in a matter of three and a half seconds in a storm. Something like that would push shit out of your virgin ass. I would let your men have their provisions. What are the provisions, by the way?”

“Wine,” Missandei says stiffly.

Yara shoots out another loud laugh. She knocks her hand against Grey Worm’s shoulder because she thinks he’s very inadvertently funny. She says, “Definitely let them have that. We all need some joys in life before we all die.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

She doesn’t lay down like how he expects her to. He expects her to lie beside him like how Unsullied sleep next to each other — on their backs, shoulder to shoulder.

But she gently lowers herself so that half of her soft body is on top of his. Her face presses into his bare chest. An arm crawls across his stomach. And his heart beat must be like thunder in her ears. He feels her lashes flick against his skin — which is abnormally sensitive right now. He feels her soft warm breath pull goosebumps from him.

“Is this all right?” she asks.

He says, “Yes.”

“I like this. Do you think we can sleep together tonight?” she asks — sounding hopeful. The Unsullied sleep together regularly. She has slept with Daenerys before. This does not seem like an ask that is out of line. “Will you stay here?”

He doesn’t know how to answer this. He is unsure of how truthful it is, when he says, “I will stay for some time.”

 

 

**Day 14**

Daenerys tells Grey Worm that he does not need to stay close to her — Hero is more than adequate. Dogkiller is more than adequate. She tells Grey Worm what he already knows, that they have another two hours before new cargo is fully loaded and they have to board the ship to set sail again. She suggests to him that he take a stroll around the city — see what it looks like.

Grey Worm says, “No.”

Daenerys looks taken aback. She echoes him. She says, “No?”

He shakes his head resolutely and says, “This one will stay with the queen. This one promises to protect the queen.”

The way he is referring to himself is not lost on anyone at all, though the other Unsullied are nonresponsive and blank. Missandei frowns. Tyrion is pretending to whistle as he rocks back and forth on his feet. For a moment, Daenerys looks like she wants to respond with harshness — perhaps banish him for a couple of hours for his own good — but she thinks better of it and she opts to be empathetic. She says, “All right, if you wish to stay, you may stay,” as she straightens up and raises her chin a little bit. “I think I would like to see a brothel.”

Tyrion says, “What?”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

She’s curled up against him, still half-splayed over him. He has turned his face away from her. He is intently watching the candle burn so that he has something to focus his mind on — so that he doesn’t have to feel himself get so turbulently angry over all of the fucking ways he has been shortchanged in life.

“Your skin is so soft,” she says quietly, running her fingertips down his sternum. It makes him want to shiver. He can see her curious and open face in his peripheral vision. He can feel her body heat. She runs her fingers back up his chest as she says, “You are softer than I am. You are soft like a baby.” He thinks that she is trying to explain to him that she sees him like a helpless, useless child and not a man. He doesn’t understand that the wonderment in her tone is due the fact that she cannot reconcile how someone who possess so much strength of will, strength of body, and strength of mind can be so smooth and so pleasant to touch.

He actually spasms involuntarily when her fingertip lightly runs over his nipple.

She freezes. She says, “I’m sorry! Did that hurt?” She automatically presses her hand against her own chest, touching her own nipple through her clothing to test if it hurts — she doesn’t think so but maybe Unsullied are more vulnerable there.

Wait. That’s not right.

Almost as if he can read her mind, he says, “It doesn’t hurt.” He’s can’t help but smile a little bit now — he has flipped his head over to look at her, in time to see the panic and worry bloom across her face. He taps his chest where she touched him. He says, “You think this is the weak point of Unsullied?” He laughs softly — not really thinking about it as he reaches out to touch her face. “You think you can kill Unsullied? With just one touch?”

Her breath stops up in her throat when he touches her. She presses her face into his palm. She says, “You are mocking me,” as her eyes warmly crinkle in the corners. She slowly kisses his palm. And then she flicks her tongue out lick his palm. She tastes salt. She says, “Am I amusing to you?” Then she kisses his hand again.

“Yes,” he says immediately, as his hand starts to aimlessly wander across her face. “Very amusing.” He gently touches her cheekbone, then the point of her nose, then her eyelids — and then very carefully, her lashes. He looks deep into the color of her eyes — he can make out his own reflection in them.

His thumb runs over her soft lips, pressing over her bottom one before he starts tracing the outline of her mouth with his forefinger. She’s staring at him intently with unblinking eyes. Her breathing is shallow and audible.

As he’s on his third revolution around her mouth, she decides she can’t take it anymore. She pushes herself closer to him, and she whispers, “Kiss me.” She grabs his wrist and lightly presses his finger against her mouth. “Here.”

He removes his hand from her face, leans forward, breathes her in, and he acquiesces.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Wonderful. He is in a brothel. There are two people vigorously copulating on a platform in front an altar. The woman is wailing loudly. The man is grunting. The Summer Islanders surrounding this platform have their eyes closed and most are moaning in ecstasy. There are people of all ages here — even ones that look too young. The ritualistic exaltations seem atypical of a brothel. However, the only other times Grey Worm’s been in brothels were the four or six raids after the death of White Rat. He did not really take much time looking around before he kicked out all of the customers and demanded answers from a bunch of violent prostitutes who called him names and tried to scratch his exposed arms because they were pissed at him for scaring off their income sources. He isn’t altogether sure he knows what a typical brothel looks like.

Grey Worm immediately steps in front of Daenerys when a naked woman wearing a headdress of bright feathers runs up to them and speaks with urgency, gesticulates wildly.

Many of them are trying to speak over each other. Tyrion is trying to smooth things over in the way that he does. Missandei is trying to translate. And Grey Worm signals to the other Unsullied to stand back as he pulls out his blade and points the tip of it at the naked woman’s throat. She freezes, and her words get sucked up into silence.

Missandei’s hand suddenly comes down hard on his wrist, grasping it and pushing down the knife. In agitation, she says to him, “The priestess is asking the Unsullied to take off your _helmets._ This is a holy space, and you cannot wear armor or bring in weapons to this temple.”

And then, with her hand still holding onto his wrist, she turns back to the priestess and speaks to the woman in halting Summer Tongue, presumably trying to smooth things over.

Daenerys gestures for them to accept the priestess’ terms. She gestures for them to take their helmets off.

Grey Worm is pissed. This is a pointless excursion, and this culture is stupid. They better not die because of this. He takes off his helmet. He unclips and then pulls off his armor. He throws his knives into Sure Spear’s arms. He tells Sure Spear and Lightning to go outside and wait with their weapons and armor. Grey Worm is giving up his armor and weapons because he is confident that if an altercation breaks out in this brothel-temple, he could probably kill any man, woman, or child in here who would threaten the queen, with his bare hands.

“Thank you,” Missandei says softly, just to him.

He just sighs. To convey to her that he heard her, that he hears her.

“So. This is different,” Tyrion says, looking around.  


 

 

 


	5. five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany gets an offer she must refuse. Grey Worm loses his religion. Tyrion is a punk. Missandei is body positive.

 

 

**Day 2**

They have to adjust to their rites because they are sequestered on these ships for many, many days. They cannot purify themselves in the proper ways. They have to make do with salt water from the ocean to purify themselves. They have to do their prayers and their rites early in the morning and late at night, as to not disrupt the schedule on the ships and also to avoid the attention of outsiders.

Grey Worm always wakes up before all others. Like the others, he rubs his bare body down with cold salt water before dawn breaks. He scrapes a blade across his arms, back, legs, and face — to slough off dead skin and any hair. He kneels alongside his men as they silently pray to the goddess — his heart is blank and quiet because he is no longer devout. He partakes in the motions of these ritual because it keeps him close to his men. He sometimes cannot separate religion from culture because they are so deeply intertwined.

He bows his head to the ground. Then he picks up a cup and holds it up to the sky. He makes eye contact with Hero, as Hero walks by with a jug, filling up all cups with the wine of courage. Hero silently pauses in front of Grey Worm — and does not fill up his commander’s cup.

The rest of them silently say another prayer to the goddess. Then the rest of them simultaneously pull their cups to their faces and swallow down the wine of courage. Grey Worm makes the motion of doing the same.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Daenerys is requesting an audience with the high priestess, who eagerly agrees. The intent of the meeting is ambiguous to the priestess however, so she spontaneously reaches out to caress the queen. When he sees this, Grey Worm walks over and grabs the woman by the back of her neck and yanks her backwards. The high priestess gasps in shock and also fear. Daenerys shouts at him to let the poor woman go.

It is this final faux pas that results in Grey Worm’s temporary banishment. Daenerys says he is too hypervigilant and paranoid today — therefore she would prefer that he stand outside of the private room. Missandei, Dogkiller, and Hero will be in the room to ensure her safety.

Grey Worm looks at Daenerys like he thinks that she has got to be fucking out of her mind — like he thinks she is really fucking overreacting to a few incidents. How can anyone fault him for being careful? Without him, she could die.

She is not intimidated by his displeasure. She actually finds him to be incredibly annoying today. He is irritable, inconsistent, volatile, and prone to bad decisions today.

Grey Worm looks at Dogkiller and Hero. He makes it clear with his eyes that if something happens to Daenerys or Missandei under their watch, he will fucking slit their throats open and feed them to feral dogs for their failure. They will die dishonorably and without the goddess’ grace. Dogkiller is trying not to smile. Hero nods with seriousness.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

At first, he kisses her by laying his lips on hers, puckering, and then pressing. It doesn’t feel like enough — it feels clinical and prescribed. He swallows his saliva nervously, and then he redoubles his efforts. He presses his lips harder against hers, and then he lightly latches onto her thick bottom lip and sucks. Part of this is instinctive. Another part of this might be from something he has seen and studied. A third part of this is that he has thought about it a lot — what he would do differently and how he would advance further, if he got the chance to kiss her again.

As he kisses her and as she kisses him back, he takes her hand and he holds onto it tightly in between their bodies. He squeezes her hand to convey reassurance and also his good intentions as the press of his mouth against hers becomes tighter and firmer.

She groans against his mouth and pulls her sweaty hand out of his so that she can wind her arm around his body. She pulls him closer. She opens her mouth to him. She hitches a leg over his. Their teeth lightly smack together because she is trying to lick the inside of his mouth. It makes her laugh — the wine coursing through her veins enables her to giggle at her own non-expertise and over his worries about this causing offense. The worry that this is just a mockery and a facsimile of something that is actually real starts to fade away a little bit more. His pulse thuds and whooshes in his ears as she whispers to him against his mouth, as she pulls away to stare back at him adoringly. She tells him she thinks about him — and _this_ — all the time. She dips back in for another kiss. Her arm envelopes his head. She presses her body even closer to his, tilts her hips toward his as she tells him she has thought about this ever since the first time. And before the first time. Maybe even during the language lessons. Sometimes it feels like always — she has always wanted this from him.

His movements are sluggish and messy and slow and lumbering — his head is hazy inside — he is a non-expert at this, amateurish. He typically does everything that requires physicality well, so his fumbling is bewildering and frustrating. He cannot think fast enough to respond to her with tender words. He is scared to touch her with his hands. He’s too anxious to be creative, so he decides to only go with what he has already learned. He rolls her over. He rolls on top of her. He presses himself into her. She gasps out his name. It is great. He thinks that he wants to die listening to the sound of that — forever. He thinks that he wants to repeat what they have already done. He kisses her mouth as he grinds into her, as her breathing hitches, and she breaks her face apart from his as she chokes a little on air. He kisses her throat as she throws her head back because it is there. Her hands are bold and running all over his bare skin. He’s too inordinately sensitive and keeps shivering and trembling because of her touching. This embarrasses him because this is not how his body typically behaves. It is so weak right now. He grabs her wrists, squeezes them together in one hand, and he pushes her arms above her head to put a temporary stop to her touching as he rocks into her. Her eyes darken before they roll back. She flutters her lashes shut.

He thinks that he can do what he has already done with her — he can combine the things — that feels safe. He wants to see her body in its entirety again, in addition to _this._ He holds down her wrists with one hand and with his other, he reaches in between their bodies — she whimpers in anticipation because she actually thinks he’s going for something else — but he actually just touches the knot at her navel — the ties hold together her top — he gently pulls at it. He says, “Can I look at you?”

She does not even need to be asked right now. She nods eagerly because she can’t talk well. She easily yanks her hands out of his grasp and frantically starts pulling at the ties — not just stopping at her top, but her pants, too — just all of her clothes. She divests herself of her clothing fast. She throws and kicks it all onto the ground. She pants heavily and watches his face look over her naked body again.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

This place is fucking terrible and an entire waste of time. Grey Worm is keeping his eyes open for Unsullied. If he sees any Unsullied here, they will be swiftly reprimanded. He sees a lot of Ironborn and a number of Dothraki here. They are being asses. They are drunk, and they are loud. They are intimidating to the Summer Islanders, who cower and do not know what to make of the foreigners — as visitors from so far away are very rare.

Another naked woman passing by looks at him curiously and then stops to gawk at him. Again, he conveys his disinterest by silently waving her off and not looking at her face, not acknowledging her as a person.

Fifteen minutes later, Tyrion happily stumbles out of a private room and find Grey Worm standing with his arms crossed and his back braced against a door.

Grey Worm stonily says, “Done already?”

Tyrion is actually really impressed by this insult. He throws his head back and laughs. He’s been drinking wine. He says, “It’s been a _while._ All I’ve seen these last two weeks is your ugly face and unending water. You can’t blame me for being a little over-excited.”

Grey Worm says nothing. He is already bored with this conversation. He stares resolutely ahead into space as Yara stumbles out of her own private room. She’s dressed, drunk, and laughing loudly. She also has a little bit of land sickness, so she sways messily on her feet as her companion tries to hold her up. She grabs the woman’s ass in gratitude, jiggles it, and then presses her face to the woman’s. Grey Worm averts his eyes. He shifts his gaze, and it lands on yet _another_ naked woman who is staring intently at him. In irritation, he snaps at her to stop looking at him — in the Summer Tongue. The words come out really effortlessly — from somewhere deep in his mind. He feels so agitated and stressed right now. He just wants to leave this place.

Tyrion notices that every naked woman in this place is staring at Grey Worm — which he chooses not to bring up. It seems pretty typical. Even a fucking eunuch stirs up more sexual interest from women than a dwarf.

It’s this quiet jealousy and resentment that inspires Tyrion to say, “I have been wondering something all morning. Perhaps you can clear it up for me. Did you fuck Missandei last night?”

The red hot scowl that breaks out across Grey Worm’s face just gives Tyrion life.

“I’m impressed,” Tyrion continues, digging in deep. “I feel pride. I feel like a proud father whose two children finally learned how to rub their naughty bits together.” Tyrion pauses. “Wait. That is disgusting.” And then he says, “How did it feel? Tell me. Did she like it? Did she beg for more cock? Or just any cock?”

And then Tyrion hacks out a cough and clutches onto his chest as he fights to breathe past the spasming of his diaphragm. Because Grey Worm just threw him into a wall. Shit. Some people just cannot take a joke.

 _“Fuck!”_ Tyrion grinds out, rubbing his chest. “This fucking hurts.”

Tyrion can hear Yara laughter from somewhere nearby. He acknowledges that he kind of deserves this.

 

 

  
**Day 7**

He looks up at the diminishing blue, cloudless sky, tinged pink and orange as the sun sets. The Unsullied are pushing barrels of water to the very edge of the ship so that there is flat surface on the bow. He looks up at Drogon, who is circling the ship. In the next vessels over, Unsullied are also pushing supplies to the edges to make space for Viserion and Rhaegal. The dragons have never flown over sea this long. They have also never traveled this slowly. They are not impervious to exhaustion.

“Looks like clear skies tonight,” Daenerys lightly remarks, also looking up at Drogon. “He will like that.”

“Is he hungry?” Grey Worm lightly inquires. He has not seen the dragons feed — they cannot afford to sacrifice their supplies to feed the dragons. They are still seven days from the nearest port.

Daenerys gives him a pensive look. Her eyes slightly narrow. Then she says, “Yes. He hasn’t eaten in many days.”

He asks because his men are no longer dispensable. If they must die, then their deaths should have meaning.

“He will wait,” she says.

Some of the other Unsullied quietly call Daenerys the goddess incarnate on earth. They have to call her this in order to reconcile their deviation from their rites and allegiances. Leaving the masters was a grave betrayal — one that can be justified if they believe Daenerys to be the goddess on earth.

He does not agree with this. He knows that Daenerys is not the goddess. The moment he gave his allegiance to her was the moment he turned his back on the goddess and doomed himself to a mortal life of just this. The moment he turned his back on the goddess and stopped paying tribute to her was the moment he realized that he was just stolen from. The masters stole from him. He didn’t freely give anything. He didn’t let himself be maimed and ruined for anything greater. They just did it to ensure his obedience to them. They just lied to them all to ensure their obedience. She is not real. His life was just stolen from him by terrible men. He just has to live this finite life and then die imperfect and ruined. There is nothing else beyond this.

“Have them prepare me a bed,” Daenerys spontaneously tells Grey Worm. “I will sleep here tonight, with my dragons.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

He doesn’t expect this, but she doesn’t immediately resume kissing him and touching him after she gets naked. She’s not bogged down by the well-worn procedures that generally occur after a woman takes off her clothes in front of a man — because she does not know them. For instance, she doesn’t lie back and shut her eyes and start making moaning noises after he enters her.

Rather, Missandei scoots off the bed and stands in front of him. Her logic _really_ is that he asked to see her body. She is showing him her body. He’s never seen it up close before — so he must be curious.

He pushes himself up and sits on the edge of the mattress on the floor. Her hips are right in front of his face. He sees hair, an expanse of smooth skin. She slowly turns around and presents her backside to him. He looks up and down her curves. She looks like a naked woman to him. But like, the best, most beautiful naked woman he has ever seen.

She turns around again. She’s smiling down at him. She places her hand on his bare shoulder and shifts her weight on her feet. She says, “What do you think? Is this how you remember it?”

He feels dumb. He does not know what other men say to the women they love. He says, “Yes. You look the same.” He does not think he should tell her that he thinks about her body all the time — mostly at night. He mostly imagines her naked body oriented so close to him — much like what is happening _right now._ He had only seen her body once — but he’s had a really deep and disgusting desire to see it again and again.

“You can touch me,” she says softly — with her face open and vulnerable. “If you want to, that is.”

He shuts his eyes. Fucking shit. What is he even supposed to say to this? His body is throbbing. The room is throbbing. His eyes are stinging. He still feels very drunk. He is trying to weigh his options as quickly as possible — just in case what she is saying is the result of a moment of insanity. He looks at her body again — her perfect, gorgeous, unmarred body — fucking _shit_ — and he realizes so much time is passing, and he is being so odd — that he cannot even answer a simple question with a painfully simple answer.

He watches her as she touches herself. She smears her own hand across her breast, manipulating it. She sighs a little bit.

 _“Missandei,”_ He says out her name in frustration. He does not have the experience or the understanding to qualify this as sexual frustration.

“I don’t know what you want,” she says quietly — honestly. “I just want to give you what you want.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

The priestess offers sex to Daenerys, Missandei, Hero, and Dogkiller — something that Missandei haltinging translates with her cheeks flushed and a lot of euphemism. She tells Daenerys that the high priestess is being hospitable and is offering them hospitality. Daenerys looks at Missandei and asks if this means water, food, shelter, or any other number of things? An awkward and protracted silence ensues. Then Missandei bluntly says that the priestess is offering a communion with the goddess of fertility and love — she is offering sex without cost.

Daenerys smiles softly. She glances at Dogkiller and Hero. She says, “Tell her that we appreciate her hospitality and we are honored to be temple guests, but we respectfully decline her offering.”

Missandei relays the message. The priestess then responds. Missandei cannot understand half of what is said — so she just translates the general spirit of the response. She says, “The priestess wants to know why we are declining her offering.”

Daenerys is surprised she is getting some resistance to this. She says, “Tell her we are women, and they are eunuchs.”

Missandei does not know the word for eunuch at all in Summer Tongue, thus a really terrible series of stutters and really vague miming ensues. Missandei slowly and wordlessly claps — then gestures to the front of her pants as she repeats a few words. Dogkiller and Hero are straight-faced and staring ahead, though they can guess what Missandei is trying to say. Daenerys is now aware that Missandei’s very impressive language abilities have a limit.

When the priestess finally understands what Missandei is trying to say, she lets out an upbeat, “Oh!” and then waves at Missandei — like she thinks Missandei is being an idiot. She says a word — and mimes out a penis in front of her pelvis. Really clearly. Much better than how Missandei did it. She repeats the term — urging Missandei to say it. She says, _“Umbolo.”_ She is trying to teach Missandei.

Missandei reluctantly and stiffly says, “Umbolo.”

“Um-bolo,” the priestess says, stressing the first syllable.

 _“Um-_ bolo,” Missandei says miserably.

Daenerys actually finds this pretty entertaining. It’s novel to watch Missandei not know something. It’s novel to see her humbly accept a language lesson instead of giving one.

More rapid Summer Tongue is uttered. The priestess gestures to her mouth and then her bottom and then her vagina. Missandei struggles to pick it up, her face screwing up in concentration. And she just has to guess a little bit. She says to Daenerys, “She says it does not matter that we are women and that they are eunuchs. We can all commune with their goddess.”

“Tell her the Unsullied’s religion does not allow for any outside worship,” Daenerys says. She knows this because Grey Worm has told her this.

 

 

 

 


	6. six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey weighs the pros and cons of being with Missandei. Missandei worries that she's a predator. Tyrion continues to be the worst.

 

 

 

  
**Day 1**

Because it continues to be near-impossible to shake off what has been ingrained since birth, Tyrion intellectualizes why he thinks he deserves his own sleeping quarters even though he is a man and space on their ship is so finite. He makes this convoluted argument about how his muscle is his brain and how his brain needs rest in order to perform optimally. He neglects to point out why his brain is so much more valuable than any other brain on the ship.

It is misdirection designed as an argument, and Daenerys can see it clearly. She dispassionately tells him that if it’s so important to him, he can sleep on another ship and have his own quarters somewhere else — that there might be room on a Dothraki ship or one of the other Unsullied ships.

Tyrion wrinkles his nose in distaste. He’s imagining himself in the midst of a bunch of bored, drunk, violent Dothrakis or worst, in the midst of a bunch of silent, severe, boring Unsullied. He clears his throat. To Daenerys, he says, “I’d rather not. As your hand, I think it’s most prudent to stay nearby, as one never knows when one might need . . . advising.”

Grey Worm, fed up with the pointlessness of this conversation and also the pointlessness of the dwarf, gruffly says, “Take mine. I don’t need room.”

Tyrion perks up upon hearing that. He says, “Why thank you, Grey Worm! A true gentleman you are!”

Missandei, standing beside the queen, widens her eyes and immediately says, “No! That’s not fair!” She sounds girlish, young, and petulant — and the sound of her own voice surprises her. She straightens her spine to inject a certain austerity to her demeanor.

Daenerys quietly grins, charmed by the novelty of hearing Missandei charged up and defensive when it comes to the ownership of place and what is fair.

“We can bunk down together?” Tyrion offers, looking up at Grey Worm, a glint in his eye. He is sure Grey Worm would not take him up on this — and he is sure that he gets to look somewhat magnanimous for offering.

As predicted, Grey Worm shakes his head resolutely and says, “No. I sleep with Unsullied.”

“You are the commander, though,” Missandei protests and, despite her firm tone, she’s actually unsure why this just means so much to her.

“And I’m the queen’s hand,” Tyrion offers. “I mean, he and I both are things.”

“He’s _not_ a thing —”

“That is just an expression.”

“It is _not!”_ she snaps in agitation.

“Oh, so you know all of the idioms of all the cultures?” Tyrion asks, amused.

She’s not very good at snappy retorts — on account of being taught to be scared to speak up against men for fear of punishment. For her, it is also near-impossible to shake off what has been ingrained since birth. And because she is not as quick or as clever with quips like Tyrion is, she resorts to just blunt force. She says, “You are wrong! And you are selfish! And you are not being very nice to him!”

This is actually something Tyrion responds well to — this kind of emotional honesty. He is charmed by this, so he starts beaming at her, which is very confusing to her, as she was not taught that she would garner this kind of response with honesty. Tyrion says, “How am I being mean to him? I gave him options.”

“It’s not on you to give him options,” she says. “You’re taking his room!”

“He’s giving it up,” Tyrion corrects. “He _chose_ to give it up.”

“I go patrol,” Grey Worm says, his voice clipped, directing his words only to Daenerys, cutting into the stupid argument.

She nods at him, acknowledging his statement before he turns around and starts walking off.

Missandei is left feeling uncertain. She worries that she has said too much — that she spoke out of turn and that she was too loud. She worries he resents that she spoke up for him. One of the lessons her mother imparted onto her is that it’s better to be unseen than to be seen. When one is unseen, one is not bothered by men. Missandei took this lesson to heart, and when Kraznys tilted up her small, child face so that it looked back into his and declared that she will learn how to read and write — she actually had the brief thought that she had gone wrong and done wrong at some point. She kept soliciting too much attention from men. She resolved to be even more quiet after that.

An issue that Missandei keeps bumping up against, here and now — a problem that her mother did not prepare her for at all — is that she wants to be bothered by Torgo Nudho. Her mother neglected to teach her nuance and optimism. Missandei wants him to bother with her.

She watches his retreating back. She feels Tyrion’s self-satisfied smirk growing. The sun is bright and hot. She is annoyed — and she finds that this is becoming an emotion that crops up increasingly for her. She feels frustrated and irritated a lot these days.

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Grey Worm pivots around and stands to attention when the door to the private room opens again and bodies start filing out. He is tense and already anticipating the worst — perhaps someone has been killed or has been hurt.

In contrast, Tyrion is beside him, casual, loose, talkative, and utterly fucking useless, having gotten over being thrown into a wall.

It turns out that everyone is still alive and unmarred.

As she walks out, Grey Worm accidentally looks straight into Missandei’s face, and just a fucking massive amount of regret hurts him in the chest and bleeds hot out of his face. He immediately cuts the eye contact because he is embarrassed, ashamed, and still really angry with himself.

The priestess has also apparently forgiven Grey Worm for threatening her with a knife and also for grabbing her by the neck — because she smiles at him as she exits the room. She has the gall — maybe the stupidity — to cup his cheek with her palm. He flinches but does not attack her because Daenerys would not approve.

He stands angrily in place and feels helpless and frustrated with his own helplessness as the priestess examines his face with her eyes and her hand. Nobody ever touches him like this — with softness — nobody except Missandei, that is. And the very thought and the constant reminder of the shame of other night is just choking.

He feels sick as the priestess strokes the skin on his face slowly and sensually, as she tells him, in Summer Tongue, that she knows who he is — he is one of them — and he is so beautiful. She tells him that their gods tell her that they are elated one of their sons has finally returned home.

In stark clarity, he suddenly recalls being taught to kneel and bow at the foot of an altar in his family home. The memory is clear — so clear that it immediately causes him to doubt its veracity. He remembers there were offerings of dried, shriveled orange peels his older sisters picked from off the ground. He remembers his mother teaching him how to pray, how to ask the gods for grace. He remembers loving her and adoring all of them — he remembers his capacity for it. He remembers his father’s absence through death — and he remembers his sisters worshipping in the temples with foreigners for coin. And he remembers that their family was very hungry when he was being taken away. He remembers the long days of praying leading up to him being taken away, his mother trying to glean answers from the gods.

His mind frantically fights to understand the sudden memories as it simultaneously tries to reject everything in rage.

He cannot _believe_ he understands this language. He cannot _believe_ the effortless way in which he remembers. He cannot fucking _believe_ that he has been _ruined_ like this.

He hates that he is constantly being reminded of what he has lost — on today of all fucking days. He hates that he is constantly paying penance — to multiple gods in multiple belief systems. He morosely wonders if his mother and his sisters are left or if they have all starved to death and it is just him and him alone now. He also corrects himself and tells himself that he doesn’t want to know any of them because they are _nothing_ to him now. And he is going to die anyway. Everyone dies in the end anyway.

He is still raging silently as the priestess curves her hand behind his neck, steps into him, and kisses him. Right on the mouth. Right there, in front of everyone.

Missandei gasps — audibly. Her hand goes to her mouth.

Grey Worm pushes the priestess off of his face — firmly and controlled. In Summer Tongue, he quietly and urgently tells her that she didn’t ask for permission. He angrily tells her that they all let him go. They all let him be taken for profit. They should have just let him die with them, because what they gave him was not a better life. They let him be ruined and destroyed — and for nothing.

 

 

  
**Day 5**

There is a part of her that is still irrationally afraid he will recoil from her if she is too forward, if she is too blatant in her affection for him, so she nervously sets her plate down a good distance away from him. She worries about causing offense — of repulsing him and of scaring him with her fondness for him. She puts a wide berth in between their bodies on the bench because, she rationalizes, this is typically want she desires from other men — space. She also shyly looks at his profile and gives him a quick smile that feels so embarrassingly earnest that she has to immediately bury that smile into her plate of salt fish and flatbread.

She is worried about overstepping because she is sensitive. She remembers when Kraznys sidled up to her and pathetically thought his smiles and his small trinkets would buy her devotion. She remembers the oppressive way he touched her and made her sit near him when she was a child. She remembers that he terrified her with his actions.

“How are you?” she asks Grey Worm.

He responds with, “The same,” without even looking at her. He’s focused on eating his dinner.

He doesn’t ask her how she is doing. He typically is very standoffish with her when there are other people around, possibly because he is embarrassed by their friendship and closeness.

She feels herself blushing. She gauges the physical distance between their bodies, and she quietly and subtly scoots a little bit away from him. Perhaps she is making him uncomfortable. She says, “Do you like fish?” She asks because she was the one who cured it and maybe he knows this.

He shrugs. He says, “Is fish. All the same.”

She says, “Oh.” And then she says, “Yes, I suppose you are right.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

As she stands in front of him, naked and vulnerable, he sighs and he tells her that she cannot give him what he wants. Before she can ask him to clarify and explain what he means, he tells her that he wants to give her what she deserves and what she needs because she is a woman — but he just cannot. He’s grasping for words because the terms he is searching are not ones he knows — in any language. The kind of conversation they are having is one that he has not been equipped to have — a fact that he is hyper aware of. He was not made for this, for this kind of intimacy and this kind of feeling or this act — so it feels like a bastardization or a mockery of what is actually real. He can only rely on vague euphemisms because he doesn’t know the right terms. So he tells her that he simultaneously feels terrible and also so good when he is with her. Because when he is with her, he forgets what he was made for.

“What were you made for?” she asks quietly, still standing nakedly in front of him.

He says, “To die.”

She blinks hard — because she was not quite expecting such a simple and blunt answer.

He orients his gaze away from her stomach and to her face. He tells her, “After Unsullied cut — blood.” He gestures down the front of his pants. “Unsullied take manhood — throw into fire of the goddess, to give to her. Unsullied make vow. To her. To honor only her until death. When Unsullied die — Unsullied join with her. Unsullied become full men once again.”

This recounting is not at all based on memory. He still cannot remember when he was cut. Rather, this recounting is based on legend. This is the story that they have been taught by the masters, to repeat to themselves over and over again. It is a misconception that Unsullied fight to the death because they have been broken as children. The truth is that Unsullied fight to the death for the same reasons that all men fight to the death — for honor, for pride, and for a belief in something greater.

He looks at her face. His eyes quickly skim down and then up her body. He remembers the first time he saw her naked body — probably a culmination and an inevitability. He stops himself from reaching out and touching her hand.

Instead, he exhales. He says, “How I feel about Missandei — what I am doing with Missandei — it betrays the goddess. It — it — I will die. I don’t care if I die. But Missandei will die also. That, I care.”

He is struggling hard — trying to explain it all. He cannot give himself to Missandei because he has already given himself over to another woman already. He was designed this way, so what he is engaging in with Missandei is very sinful and wrong. He has been trying and failing at stopping it. He has arrived at this terrible juncture — and he is just so _flawed._

He blinks rapidly and tries to clear his head with another breath in. He is having a hard time telling her about the goddess because even though he is a non-believer, he has been so deeply conditioned to not tell outsiders about the goddess. It is impossible to push himself to do something that has been taught to be against the core of his entire being. He is a non-believer, but he is still afraid of what will happen to them — to Missandei — with this egregious betrayal.

She’s looking down at his face. She cups his cheeks in her hands. She says, “I would die for you.”

He feels dull inside — because the truth is obvious and inevitable. He responds, “I would die for you, also.” And then — quickly — he adds, “I don’t believe anymore. In her. I don’t believe. It is a lie.”

 

 

  
**Day 12**

She waits as he quickly climbs down the side of the ship and dunks himself in freezing cold seawater to get the fish blood and guts off of his hands and body. He refuses to clean himself off with fresh water because he does not want their cooking and drinking water to be wasted on his body.

He’s dripping wet as he climbs back over the railing. And she is waiting for him with a bucket, filled with only a modest amount of freshwater, and scrap cloth. When he spots the bucket, he looks at her warily.

She rationalizes it like this: “The salt is not good for your skin. This will only take a moment.”

She sometimes feels like she’s engaging in a facsimile of what it is actually like to care for someone. Here she is, telling him how he ought to wash, playing the farcical part of wife.

“It’s fine,” he says.

“The bucket is already here.”

“Dump it back,” he suggests.

“No,” she answers. “Please, it will make you feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“Please,” she repeats. “You have many days of accumulated sweat and fish grime on you.”

He looks mildly startled at that. He starts sniffing himself. He starts with his forearm, then an armpit. He asks, “Do I smell like fish?”

She is horrified over inadvertently causing him to think that he smells bad to her. This is why she overreacts. This is why she loudly says, “No! You smell fine! You smell like salt and like you. I mean — like you usually do. I mean — I don’t smell you on purpose. Sometimes you walk by and I smell you by happenstance. I am not trying to smell you. You know what? Forget it.” She throws the scrap cloth into the bucket in frustration, carefully avoiding eye contact.

And in the corner of her eye, she can see him smiling at her.

 

 

 

**Day 14**

Missandei doesn’t need an expansive vocabulary in Summer Tongue to understand the conversation that is unfolding in front of her. Her heart generally clenches for him as she listens to the priestess ignore all of his accusations and his pain. The priestess does not express regret or acknowledge the history of this culture selling a generation of their men off to fight foreign wars. The priestess is resolutely serene and bizarrely forward-looking as she tells him that he has come back to them.

One of the many things that Missandei intuitively knows about him and the way that he thinks is that he is obsessed with projecting forward to the future as a means of ignoring the past. He will not admit to it, but Missandei knows that the way that the future is being talked about here hurts him. He resents being told he is back. He resents his lack of choice and agency in it, so he responds by telling the priestess that he is not theirs anymore. He angrily tells the priestess that he is leaving. Missandei can read between the lines of his clipped utterances. She knows that these words are coming out of his mouth because he needs to have a choice, and he needs to feel in control of his own future — even if that future is bleak.

She starts wiping the stinging sweat dripping into her eyes — and it must look like she is wiping away tears because Tyrion kind of glances at her intently. They are causing a scene. Daenerys also looks at Missandei intently in a mixture of alarm, confusion, and curiosity. Missandei’s focus remains on following the conversation.

She makes a surprised sound out of her throat when she hears the priestess tell Grey Worm that she will pray for him. She flinches before he even responds — because she knows what his response will be.

He explodes. He is shouting. It makes everyone else around them jump. He throws a finger into the face of the priestess and he tells her to never fucking pray for him because praying is pointless. He yells to her that he follows no more gods. He will never follow men again. He will never serve tyrants again. He will never condone evil. He will never kneel down to another god.

Perhaps the conflict here is due the fact that he has decided to firmly root himself in the tangible, mortal world because of what he has lived through — and the priestess has the unmoving belief that she is a vessel connected to the heart of their god because of what they have lived through. This divergence in trajectory means that they will never agree or reconcile here.

The priestess tells him that she loves him and that there is so much love available to him if he would just open himself up to it.

That is the last straw for him. To Dogkiller and Hero, Grey Worm barks at them, tells them that he is leaving and they are to stay behind. The switch from Summer Tongue to Low Valyrian is incredible and seamless. He angrily walks out of the temple after that.

And Tyrion, who is full of purposeful, terrible timing, looks at the doorway that Grey Worm just exited through. He tries to lighten the very tense and confused mood by saying, “So why hasn’t he been our translator? His Summer Tongue is _amazing._ It’s so much better than Missandei’s.”

 

 

 

 


	7. seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey Worm quits because he is reasonable. Missandei gets blamed because she's a woman.

 

 

**Day 8**

After an entire week of not bathing, her scalp is itchy and greasy, the ends of her curls are brittle, she smells, and she has to miserably contend with menstruation. The lack of privacy on the ship harkens back to her childhood, the years of slavery and of being own like chattel. She was largely abused and neglected — until the masters discovered her talent for language. Then she was sold. Before being tutored, she spend her formative girlhood years being filthy and eating leftover scraps from the kitchen she was placed in.

Being on a ship full of men — it does not matter than they are Unsullied — makes her feel re-institutionalized. She has to schedule her trips to the toilets so that they only occur around the rise and fall of the sun. She rations her water intake during the day.

She is grateful and very embarrassed when Daenerys intuits Missandei’s situation. Daenerys presses on the fact that they are both women, and she keeps Missandei close under the guise of needing Missandei to be a witness to reports that Grey Worm and Yara Greyjoy give. She has hot water boiled over the hearth brought to her private chambers and she has Missandei take off her clothes.

Missandei’s dry, sun-tanned face winces and her chapped lips draws into a tight line as she obediently disrobes, standing rigidly and naked in front of the queen, as if waiting to be inspected.

Daenerys frowns. She asks that Missandei sit on the ground. And then Dany takes a rough washcloth, dips it into the hot water, and starts rubbing it up and down Missandei’s bare back and behind her neck. Dany conversationally says, “I once had a nursemaid who made me wash twice behind my ears. She said it was very dirty back there.”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

He regrets his outburst almost immediately. His shame is palpable when the hot sun hits his face, blinding him. Unsullied are not designed to be heard or to draw attention, and he has done both. He shuts his eyes. Hazy red-blue sunspots float and waver lazily behind his lids. He still harbors a dull headache because he is hungover. He also realizes that he shamefully abandoned Daenerys, albeit in relative safety, because he got emotional. His conduct is disgustingly improper and when Sure Spear quizzically asks him where the others are, Grey Worm leaks out more bitterness. He melodramatically tells Sure Spear and Lightning that they are all fucking dead. They are all fucking dead because Grey Worm is fucking _weak._

In shock and alarm, Lightning questioningly asks if Grey Worm is saying that the queen is dead — what happened in the brothel?

It is then that Missandei and Daenerys step out through the doorway.

In her Valyrian dialect, Daenerys wryly says that she is not dead. She is still very much alive. She appreciates their concern.

And then, directing her attention to Grey Worm, she says, “I am disappointed in you today.” She says it plainly and matter-of-factly. It makes him think that he deserves nothing more.

She is awaiting explanation — she is expecting for him to express contrition and to offer up reasons for his bizarre and erratic behavior today. Her expression pinches under the bright sun. She scrutinizes his face, searches it for answers.

He effectively blocks her gaze by plucking his helmet from Lightning and roughly sliding it back onto his head, obscuring his entire face. Daenerys looks surprised — and she’s on her way to being miffed — but he does not give much of a shit about his disrespect of her at the moment. He then starts quickly pulling his armor back on — he starts covering himself and blocking in more heat even though it is already too hot. He feels these complicated feelings of embarrassment. However, unused to any sort of deep self-examination, he is unable to understand that his shame over how self-indulgent he was in the temple connects to how self-indulgent he feels in being naked with Missandei.

He just currently hates himself. He is not deserving. He knows this, so he tells himself that Daenerys’ disappointment in him does not particularly hurt, as his chest aches and as his head pounds in pain.

His voice is low as he tries to course-correct. He thinks he’s course-correcting as he says, “Hero will lead Unsullied.”

Hero hears his name and understands enough of the Common Tongue to raise his brows.

“For the rest of today?” Daenerys asks, the corners of her mouth turning down.

“And tomorrow,” he says. He clears his throat.

“Your grace, I think he means he is giving up his post,” Missandei gently cuts in, always translating for him even when they are in an awkward place like this.

“I _know_ what he is saying,” Daenerys says, her voice clipped. “I was giving him an opportunity to think better of it.”

Tyrion is shielding his eyes from the sun and thinking that a lot of this is probably his fault. Like Grey Worm, Tyrion is also bad at feeling guilt so he can only state the facts, and he can only partially take responsibility. He probably shouldn’t have manipulated the situation and gotten Grey Worm to drink. He probably shouldn’t have done all of these things as they arrived at the place that Grey Worm was ripped from, before he was mutilated and enslaved. Tyrion just didn’t know Grey Worm would quit over this stupid shit. He probably shouldn’t have given Grey Worm an inordinate amount of shit over Missandei. And honestly, Missandei shouldn’t have fucked the man however she managed to do it and made him fucking lose his mind with her body. There is a reason why Unsullied get cut. It is so they can kill and murder without fucking throwing tantrums in a fucking brothel.

 

 

**Day 9**

They are eating breakfast side by side on the top deck. The boat gently rocks and there’s nothing to see except for puffy, billowy clouds that speckle the great expanse of blue sky — and Drogon in the far-off distance, who has Daenerys on his back.

A soft, cool breeze hits Missandei’s face. And then she catches his eye — she catches his expression softening before he realizes what is happening to his face, and he steels it back to nothingness.

When she sneaks some hard flatbread onto his plate because she is full and she wants him to have her leftovers, they both look down at her hand. She has picked at her cracked cuticles out of boredom until they started bleeding. Her hand looks like a mess.

He grunts in disapproval, turning her hand over so that her palms face up at the sun. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but she’s attentive as he flips her hand back over and gently runs his thumb over the sore cuts.

Missandei starts to say, “I—”

But then Yara Greyjoy’s shadow darkens over them. Her face is grim and she is only speaking to Grey Worm as she says, “You need to signal your queen. She needs to come down right now. Tell your men to start replacing the staysail with the jib.Then lower the mainsail and lash it to the boom. Most ships have only a single sail track, so the mainsail has to be removed from the track. The sheets for the trysail are rigged and need to be hoisted in place and trimmed.”

Grey Worm responds to this calmly with an honest, “What?”

Yara sighs out a, “Fuck,” as she shakes her head. Language barrier. She casts her eyes to Missandei’s, as if telepathically telling Missandei to go on ahead and translate for her then.

Missandei slowly shakes her head helplessly. It’s not the individual words that are tripping up Grey Worm. It’s the cumulative effect. Missandei has the same troubles.

Then Yara, fed up with how slow they are, points to the sky. She says, “There’s a storm coming. Do you understand that?”

 

 

  
**Day 14**

She has to make herself ignore Tyrion’s pointed looks as they descend the rocky steps down to sea level. He has evidently decided to blame her for the day’s latest and most distasteful development. Sweat blooms on her forehead as she concentrates on not tripping and falling down the steps — as she also focuses on Daenerys, making sure she’s there to catch the queen if the queen happens to trip. Missandei also presses her gaze to the back of his helmet and just feels sick over it all.

Tyrion assumes that she is not getting his subtlety. This is why, upon getting to the very last step, he lightly hits her forearm to get her attention. She looks down at him, her mouth drawn in a tight line. He is undeterred. He tilts his head to Grey Worm’s back. He very quietly whispers, “Fix this.” He tells her to fix it as if he believes that she bears responsibility because she was the one who broke him in the first place.

The implication makes her flare even hotter. Salt on her lashes stings her eyes, and she swipes at them with the back of her right hand — she always looks like she is crying when she makes this gesture. Before she became too old for Kraznys’ direct affections, she spent years chewing off her nails, cutting her hair, scratching her face, and caking dirt on her body to make herself less attractive to him. The look of own body betrayed her. There were so many things out of her hands and out of her control, but the ghost of her mother’s voice was in her head and told her she could exert some control in how she appeared to men. The self-abuse and her unwillingness to stop it eventually made him upset with her enough to put chains on her after he dictated how she was to be dressed.

She ignores Tyrion pointed stare at first, expecting him to get the hint.

He sighs heavily. He quietly says, “Missandei.”

“Fix what?” she hisses under her breath, trying to keep their conversation near-silent, trying to play dumb.

“Him.”

 

 

  
**Day 13**

After a certain point, she feels self-conscious standing in front of him so naked as he sheds so many words over his deeply personal beliefs, so she quietly situates herself next to him on the thick sleeping pad. Her bare hip skims the side of his as she folds her hands together in her lap. She looks at their feet splayed out in front of them, hers a bit shorter than his. She flexes her calves before she points her toes, trying to see how much she can shorten the distance. Her clothes litter the floor — her bottoms, her top, her shoes, and her undergarments are decorating bare wood boards. His shirt is tucked in a shadowed corner. She must have thrown it there thoughtlessly after she took it off him. The small room feels tight — almost claustrophobic. It feels intimate.

He tells her that he now believes that they have all been fed lies in order to ensure their obedience and to take away their humanity. He looks at his own hands, and he clenches them as he says this. He tells her that he used to welcome death because death used to mean something — it meant wholeness and peace. He tells her that now there is no peace and there is no meaning or wholeness.

She lightly says, “And yet, you are still here.”

He resolutely says, “I believe in her.”

“In Daenerys.”

“Yes, in Daenerys,” he says firmly. And then, after a short pause, he also says, “I am not good at anything else. I can’t do anything else.” He leans back a little bit, cracking the knuckles on his thumbs. “I can’t farm. Can’t make weapons. Can’t cook.”

That makes her look at him — and when she catches his face, she sees him smiling at her. He’s thinking of cleaning the guts from fish.

He’s eyeing one of her two books on the ground. He reaches over to pick it up. He measures the weight of it in his hands. He conversationally adds, “I can’t read.”

“You can read!” she protests. She protests in part because he calling into question her skill as his teacher.

“I mean, can’t read like scholar,” he amends, his smile deepening, teeth showing at the indignation on her face — causing her heart to flip. He transfers his gaze to the book. He flips it open to a random page. His finger skims down the soft, well-worn edge as he pulls the book closer to face, trying to read the small text against flickering candlelight. He asks, “What is . . . wall-ee?”

“Whale,” she corrects leaning over, pulling the book from his loose grasp. “It’s a really big fish.” She doesn’t really want to give him a language lesson right now. She thinks that the speed in which he acquired a new language was stunning. She thinks that it is actually tragic and sad, that he learned to read so late in life because he is so intelligent and talented with language. She thinks that if life had turned out different for him, maybe he could have been a scholar and not a fighter. She shuts the book and drops it back on the floor. Her breast brushes against his arm.

He pointedly ignores it. He says, “I know big fish. Which?”

Instead of asking him how he knows big fish — living on land the way that he has been — she wraps an arm around his shoulders and presses her face against his neck. Her voice is muffled, as she says to him, “Did you ever think that we’d be like this? Did you ever imagine that we’d be talking about big fish while naked and in bed together?”

“I’m not naked,” he corrects.

“I am,” she says.

“I know.”

She puffs out a laugh, as she touches her lips to his pulse. She asks, “How does it make you feel? What does it make you think?”

“Pain,” he immediately says. “Confused. Scared.”

She freezes against him, just for a moment before she resumes laying short kisses on his neck. She can actually feels his blood throbbing against her lips. She lays her hand on his chest, searching for his heartbeat, to confirm her suspicions. His heart is hammering against his sternum. He is nervous. She soothingly rubs his skin. It startles him. His jumpiness is strange and out of character. She asks, “Are you scared that I will hurt you?”

He assumes she means literally. This is why he nearly scoffs. His tone is haughty as he says, “I am stronger than Missandei. You can't hurt me.”

She nearly rolls her eyes, pausing for a moment before burrowing her face deeper into him. Her entire front is sticking to his entire arm. He has gone rigid.

His heart is still pounding underneath her palm

 

 

  
**Day 14**

Daenerys does not give into his insecurities. She does not tell him that she needs him — even if it is true. She does not think she should need to tell him to get fucking straight. She thinks that he needs to figure this out for himself because her responsibilities are too great for her to coddle the ego and of yet another man whose personal foundations are shaky — even if she is very fond of this particular one.

Daenerys is also irritated with Missandei. Missandei won’t tell her what is happening. Missandei won’t give her the missing pieces of the puzzle. She finds that she feels inconvenienced by Missandei’s stubbornness and her lack of acquiescence and obedience today. These are traits that Daenerys appreciates and fosters when they are in opposition to men. But Daenerys finds that when the disobedience is directed at herself — something dark and hypocritical creeps out. She is being confronted with her own personal failings. She didn’t expect this today — which is also irritating.

Tyrion has no more jokes left. They just all silently make their way back to the ships.

 

 

  
**Day 13**

They quietly talk as she smooths her hands over his exposed skin, over his face, arms, chest, and stomach. He flinches, goes rigid, and sometimes convulses under her touch. The first time she lays her warm palm on his stomach, he forcefully grabs her wrist and stills her roving hand on instinct. she tells him that there are different ways of being hurt. She tells him that they don’t have to do _anything_  more together. She doesn’t want him to do anything that makes him feel upset or uncomfortable. They can just continue talking. She tells him that she loves talking to him — she is content with that. She hopefully suggests to him, again, that maybe they could just sleep together. She tries to convince him of this by bringing up the logistical advantages — mostly that they can freely talk without worrying about an end to it. They can just fall asleep talking.

Her face is so optimistic and so eager and also so innocent that it just guts him. He points his scowl to the ceiling. He tells her that he can’t just sleep next to her. It’s not so simple.

She says, “Oh! I don’t snore, I don’t think. And when you get tired, you should just tell me you’re tired, and I will stop talking — I promise. I won’t keep you awake all night. I won’t interrupt your sleep. I _promise.”_

He glances over at her — she’s got her body squished up in a bit of a self-conscious, feminine pose — and her face is just so open and vulnerable — and ridiculous. “Missandei. I can’t sleep with you.”

The hopeful expression on her face just drops. She looks utterly gutted.

It makes him want to laugh because he honestly doesn’t know why she cares about him so much. He manages to let a smile slip out. He tries to convey the obvious without being explicit. He says, “On Naath, is it . . . regular practice for men and women to sleep together . . . without clothes on?”

“Oh,” she says softly. “Well, uh — I —” She’s a little embarrassed now. “Sometimes they do. When they are . . . involved.”

“Are we . . . involved?”

 

 

 

 


	8. eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues having the most spectacular hissy fit and everyone is concerned about him. Tyrion blames Missy's vagina for messing up Grey's brain because of course he does. Grey and Missy have a lot of shame and guilt associated with sex because their cultures and society have just really messed them up. But they are figuring it out! They are figuring it out! Grey's bff is trying to stop his buddy from ruining his career and life. Aw, HERO!

 

 

 

**Day 1**

Because he has given up private quarters to Tyrion, he has to fight through the orderly chaos below deck to find a spot for rest. Hero’s alertness immediately notifies the other Unsullied of their commander’s presence. The chatter dies down to nothing — and Grey Worm’s shifting eyes scan the tight space for him to hang up his armor. The beds are stacked — claustrophobic bunks with no sitting room.

Lightning balks when he realizes that the commander is looking for a spot. He didn’t anticipate this because, previously, he was told that the commander would have his own quarters. In Low Valyrian, he snaps at Blue Snake and tells the younger Unsullied to move out of the commander’s way.

Honestly, though, Blue Snake perhaps only has a foot accidentally outstretched that may trip up their commander if Grey Worm happened to veer a hard right. Nonetheless, Blue Snake _scrambles_.

Grey Worm insists on sleeping on the floor, because he’s last one in. The rest of them are horrified at the thought of their leader sleeping on such a lowly surface. They cannot verbalize this so boldly, because it embarrasses them, so they just dwell in the thick awkwardness.

At least until Eamon forgets to feel self-conscious. Before the candlelight gets snuffed out, they all have to put up with an hour of Eamon’s lengthy sighs and his plaintive open-ended questions about the afterlife. Eamon wants to know if any of them wonder or are concerned about the logistics of becoming complete men once again. Eamon asks, out loud to no one in particular, if anyone else thinks it’s going to be difficult, learning how to urinate with a penis.

Eamon’s blunt and emotional display of vulnerability generally makes the other Unsullied very uncomfortable. It makes the older ones angry, because this is not their way. To circumvent a fight, Hero clears his throat and then tells Eamon to leave the sleeping quarters right away. Eamon is being banished. He is to sleep elsewhere because they can hear that his faith is wavering.

  
  
  
  


**Day 14**

They don’t have the vocabulary to talk with depth with one another a lot of the times. Not only is their language limited in a certain kind of vocabulary — they were only taught terms of action and of description. They were not taught terms that express complexity and humanity.

So, Hero is at a complete loss for words. He knows that Dogkiller thinks that Grey Worm has to be bluffing — or Grey Worm is currently angry and emotional and will cool off at some point and eventually come back to his senses — so Dogkiller is not particularly alarmed just yet.

Hero is, however. Hero is very, very alarmed.

Most of them splinter apart after they climb back onto the ship. The queen wants space from them, so they hang back as she looks up to the sky and seeks out her dragons. The dwarf disappears somewhere. The translator follows the queen. Dogkiller thinks a lot of what is happening is the translator’s fault — something that he has voiced very, very quietly to Hero when they were briefly alone earlier in the day. Hero does not necessarily agree. He thinks a lot of this is because of where they were. He remembers when he was cut. He has sporadic memories of his life before he was cut. It was a wretched life, and he was alone. He does not know what thoughts he would have if he had to revisit it. And he continues to drink the wine of courage. Grey Worm does not drink the wine.

This is why it is beyond frightening to him — when he gets a sense of dread and just knows to follow Grey Worm down below deck.

  
  
  
  


**Day 13**

They continue sitting next to each other on her bedding, shoulder to shoulder, side by side. She lays her hands on top of her crotch, perhaps subconsciously protecting her modesty, intertwining her fingers together as she steadily breathes in and out. It makes her remember the first time she caught him looking at her body — in contrast to what he is doing right now, which is staring resolutely ahead at the wall.

She remembers feeling his gaze before seeing it. She remembers how her body flushed in surprise and how unexpected it was to see him looking at her in that way. She remembers thinking it was distinctly different from how other Unsullied looked at her. She also remembers a certain indignity in it — a gut response that was contextualize by her experiences with other men. Perhaps that is why she stood up and covered her body with her hands as he continued to stare.

It took time for her to process through it, for her to accept that he is different and that maybe he was as surprised by it as much as she was.

She lifts her hand off her crotch. She reaches over and grasps onto his hand. She squeezes it tightly. She says, “We are involved.”

  
  
  
  


**Day 2**

Lightning lodges a complaint to him against Eamon. Lightning suggests to Grey Worm that they slash Eamon’s throat and throw him overboard because Eamon has become a poison that will infect the rest of the Unsullied.

In agitation, Lightning tells his commander that he caught Eamon _not_ drinking the wine of courage. Lightning tells Grey Worm that Eamon has lost his way, is no longer devout, is no longer in the goddess’ grace — he is a tumor. And they must cut him off right now.

Something prickles in the back of Grey Worm’s mind at that. He works to not let his own hypocrisy show on his face. He is dismissive of Lightning’s concern. He tells Lightning to pay this no mind — because he will tend to it.

  
  
  


**Day 14**

She follows and then catches Tyrion distractedly pour himself _another_ glass of wine from a cask even though it is brutally hot midday in the Summer Isles. Her expression is grim and pinched — she still has a headache — she is staring at him. She expectantly is waiting for him to come up with a solution to their current problem. He is the hand of the queen after all.

“What will we do now?” she asks him.

“Drink ourselves dumb, of course,” he answers flippantly, as he tips his cup back and tastes the wine.

She is not at all amused by this.

He notices. He clears his throat and pauses, thinking over what he wants to say. And then he carefully offers, “Honestly, Missandei, does it make much difference? Whether it is Grey Worm leading the Unsullied or Hero? Are they not all more or less the same — interchangeable?”

“They are _not_ the same!” she declares, offended that Tyrion is even saying this.

“Well,” he says slowly, bringing his cup back up to his lips. “Perhaps you should have considered that before you _fucked him.”_ He is staring back at her directly — plainly and matter-of-factly. He has read histories on the eunuch army. He knows certain things about them. “They are not like normal men, you know. They are barely like _people_. They have a very strict code of conduct — many tenets of which, I am sure, he broke when he laid with you.”  Tyrion shrugs. “Look, I like Grey Worm a lot. I am fond of him. But we must respect their customs and religion. We don’t understand _their ways,_ Missandei.”

In response to his disgustingly off-putting condescension, Missandei snappishly says, “It’s not their religion.”

“Pardon?” Tyrion says, tilting his ear to her, as if he actually wants to hear her better.

“It is not _their_ religion,” she repeats. “It is the masters’ religion. The masters indoctrinated the Unsullied with this terrible belief system to keep them subservient.”

After a somewhat lengthy pause — one in which Tyrion just offers her a pitying look — he must think she is pitiful because she is lovelorn or lovesick — he takes another sip from his cup. Then he says, “That is one way to look at it.”

  
  
  
  


**Day 9**

It takes no time at all before the sky opens up and brings down a belly of darkness. It takes no time at all before the dragons roar and Daenerys climbs onto Drogon’s back, before he leaps to the sky and flies off against the rain and the deafening wind. They are flying to clearer skies.

As the rain in a sheet of wind starts to beat down in his face — as he looks to his men and the Dothraki and calculates their relative inexperience — and as Hero and Dogkiller shout at him in Low Valyrian for commands — he looks to Yara in the dark, on her ship.

She is sailing her ships away from land — and it seems utterly counterintuitive, but he shouts at his men to the do the same.

He soon hears Missandei scream out his name — as she runs up to him and grabs onto his forearm. She says, “Torgo Nudho!” as she blinks against the wind. She shouts, “What do you need me to do! How can I help!” She is screaming this at him because she does not want to be far away from him, especially not in this perilous situation. She is also screaming this at him because they must need all hands on deck.

He lets his feelings for her cloud his judgement, though. He feels afraid for her — and this is why he ignores her words. This is why he grabs her wrist and quickly drags her to Eamon. This is how he comes to bark out quick orders in Low Valyrian — orders that she can understand.

Her eyes go wide — she says, “No!” as she starts struggling against his grasp.

Eamon hesitates.

And Grey Worm snaps, “Now! Go now!”

  
  
  
  


**Day 13**

She leans over and quickly presses her lips into the side of his face, into his cheek. Her reasoning is that if he does not want to sleep with her, then they can do some more of this instead.

She peppers soft, open mouth kisses against his skin, first laying them on his face, which is familiar to her, before venturing over to his ear — he flinches because the sound smacks in his eardrum loudly, which makes her giggle softly.

She kisses his neck, his shoulder, his collarbone — as her hand tightens around his.

She thinks about all of these things she has accepted as truth at face value — without question. She thinks about what she was taught by her mother — and then the masters — about what her body is made for and what it entices. She thinks about the necessity of covering up, in order not to entice. She thinks about shame and fear — and how clothes must sometimes serve as armor. She thinks back to her first bleed, and how it signaled a new kind of vulnerability under the dominion of men.

She thinks about how the masters introduced her to the Unsullied, when she first encountered them as a child, when she gasped, and shrank — because they were intimidating sentinels with obscured faces, spears, and thick armor. They looked like monster-warriors. The masters drove a knife into the thigh of an Unsullied to prove a point. They soothingly told her that she had nothing to fear from Unsullied — they are not real men. They do not have the desires, motivations, instincts, hearts, or even the brains of real men.

Her kisses become thicker and more languid — wetter, too. She starts slowing down and using her tongue and teeth against his soft and smooth skin. She starts breathing hard as her own exposed skin tingles in these strategic places. She thinks that he is so beautiful-looking — sometimes breathlessly beautiful. She thinks that she ought to tell him this, actually.

She turns his face so his eyes are looking at hers. She says to him, “I think you are beautiful.”

  
  
  
  


**Day 14**

Grey Worm knows that he was followed — because he is considered the best and the bravest of all them. He already knows that’s a crock of shit. And he is already expectantly waiting for Hero below deck when Hero arrives.

Grey Worm looks to the ceremonial cup. He gestures to it with his chin. His arms are crossed. He understands that he has been deeply flawed — he has been behaving in a distinctly unbecoming, erratic way. He is very ashamed, and short of killing himself for this weakness, he just tells Hero that he needs for Hero to pour for him.

Hero has to pour the wine of courage for him because they are not allowed to pour for themselves — it is blasphemous.

Carefully — and he is very concerned about his commander — Hero asks Grey Worm what Grey Worm intends to do here.

Grey Worm says he intends to drink it, of course.

He refrains from telling Hero that he intends to lessen the pain. And the thoughts. And the feelings. And the guilt. And the regret. Just all of it. He would like to shut down his mind again.

Out loud, Grey Worm simply says he is trying to forget. And he is trying to correct and to atone and to even himself out again. Grey Worm tells Hero that maybe he has been all wrong.  

Hero reminds Grey Worm that Grey Worm is not a believer anymore.

Grey Worm tells Hero to just pour it. Because at a certain point, it does not even matter what is in their hearts. All that matters is what is reflected out — and what their actions are.

  
  
  
  


**Day 13**

She stands up again, crosses over his feet so she is standing in front of him — and standing close — and she swallows the thick lump in her throat as she fights to see past her throbbing heart in her chest.

His own heart is throbbing, as he forcefully keeps his eyes trained on her face because anywhere else is disrespectful — and he’s already been far too disrespectful before.  

So he doesn’t see when her hand gently picks up his hand. He initially doesn’t really react very much as she slowly, but firmly puts his palm against her bare breast.

But then he sucks in a sharp breath. She gasps, too — because she honestly has been thinking about this for a long time now — doing this with him. Her heart is pounding so hard that she is having a hard time qualifying what she is feeling — whether it is abject fear and terror — or something else entirely.

He feels like he is losing his mind. He feels like this is a test of some sort. He feels that he is destined to fail. His feels his mouth salivating and his tongue getting thick and numb. He feels violent and angry, like he wants to hold her down and make her scream. He is scared to death of this baseness and this darkness. He thought that this maleness had been excised from him, because that is the point of the ritual. That is the point of communion. That is the point of being under the goddess' grace.

His head is pounding, and he is tense and frozen, with his hand still cupping her breast.

She looks down at him through these haughty, heavy-lidded eyes — almost regally. She draws her bottom lip into her mouth. She bites down on it. She shuts her eyes. And she softly moans.  

She also says his name. Coyly. She says, “Torgo Nudho.”

And then that is _it._ He lifts his hand off of her soft breast so that he can dig his fingers into her ass. He yanks her down on top of him — into his lap — she is already waiting and ready to meet him there. She grabs his face, she sucks in air — she _licks his mouth_ — and then she buries her guttural groan against the seal of his mouth over hers.  

  
  
  
  


 

**Day 14**

Hero tells Grey Worm that Grey Worm is speaking like a heathen. It’s just a statement of fact, not a criticism. Grey Worm just speaks like someone who believes that life is finite. Hero tells Grey Worm that it’s disgraceful to use the rites like this. But then, of course it doesn’t matter to Grey Worm because Grey Worm doesn’t believe. Hero does, though. And Grey Worm knows this. Grey Worm knows that Hero has to pour the wine of courage if asked to. Grey Worm is forcing his hand. This is very disrespectful. The rituals are sacred. The rituals are not frivolous merriment, like how non-believers treat their wine.

Hero is getting agitated. This abstract feeling of tension is bubbling up inside of him — even though he drinks the wine of courage. His loyalty to Grey Worm typically supersedes everything else. He never ever says a word against their commander — not even in jest. He is never critical of their commander. He never questions his commander. They have known one another since they were children. He remembers the moments he would have perished under his uncontrolled fear because he was a very weak child. And he remembers grace and empathy and sacrifice at the feet of the masters, from his friend, because his friend can _withstand_. Hero renamed himself the way he did because of those memories. His name is supposed to be a constant reminder. Sometimes the root of devotion and loyalty is painfully simple. He never expected to be tested on this. He is starting to feel anger right now because he is starting to think that he is being oppressed by someone that he never expected to be betrayed by.

He tells Grey Worm he does not want to pour Grey Worm the wine of courage. It is not right. Do not make him.

In the Common Tongue, Grey Worm wonders out loud. He says, “There were so many to choose from, to lead Unsullied. Why choose me?”  

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
